Free A Virtuous Ruby by Piper Huguley Page B

corner of his mouth. At first, Mags stayed in the small back room with him and Ruby, wiping the blood up, but each time Mags did so, her eyebrows met in the middle of her brown forehead, which wrinkled in worry and consternation.
    “Mags, you might be more comfortable in the big room.” Adam adjusted the stiffened ragchest cast that he made for Travis to try to bring his cracked ribs together for them to heal.
    “I want to stay. If- if-if something happens.”
    Without him even uttering a word, Ruby, so much shorter than her younger sister, guided her from the room with authority and care.
    Having Ruby with him was like having another pair of hands. He could accomplish so much more with such assistance. So just what did he want to accomplish in his practice? He hadn’t given it much thought before because his efforts had been so focused on his education. Strange, but he didn’t realize until he came to Winslow that he could actually help people.
    How could this simple country woman have such poise? She was just a midwife who didn’t know proper procedure.
    But she could be taught.
    Adam turned his attention back to Travis and he could see that Travis had slipped into sleep. He was not in pain, which was good because he would not live very long. Travis would be his first death in this community and he didn’t want to be blamed for it. Maybe it would be better if he left for the steel mills opportunity he had been putting off in Pittsburgh, tending to the Negro workers there.
    Ruby tip-toed into the room. “He not long for this world is he?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    Big round tears slipped down her brown freckles. “It’s all my fault. That’s what people will say.”
    “You didn’t attack him.”
    “I had the meeting again. After I had been attacked before.”
    “What do you think that your meetings will achieve?”
    Her large brown eyes fixed on him. “My mother’s little brother, Arlo, he came here to live a few years ago. He needed a job and Daddy thought he could help on the farm. But he wasn’t too good with farm work.”
    “Not everyone is.” Adam could well sympathize.
    Her eyes grew pointed and pieced him. “There aren’t a lot of choices for a Negro man down here. So Uncle Arlo went to the mill. He could see how things were there. He said things weren’t right. Said if the men stood up and asked for more, Paul Winslow could make things better. That’s when the lynchings started. People didn’t know at first that Paul Winslow was behind it. Then…”
    He went and stood next to her. “Yes?”
    “I was attacked. By David after I was coming home from a delivery. He acted as if he was my friend, like always, but then he got mean and said things. I didn’t know him. I think he had some liquor or something.”
    Adam touched her arm and a surge of feeling shot through him. “You don’t have to continue, Ruby, if you don’t want to.”
    She took a deep calming breath and he pulled his arm away. He shouldn’t have touched her, but she seemed so upset. He wanted to take that upset away, just as when she thought something bad would happen to her son. “The attack, Uncle Arlo knew, was ’cause they were trying to come for him by getting me since I was helping him spread the word about organizing and making a NAACP chapter down here. He dared to go to Paul Winslow and say something to him. He was shot in the woods after he was coming home from working at the mill one day. I found his body.”
    “That had to be hard.”
    “It was hard that he never got the chance to say goodbye. He kept saying to us that the mill wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.” She turned her eyes to the bed where Travis lay. “He and Travis were friends. They were about the same age and Travis wanted to pay court to Mags, the first one of us somebody wanted the right way.”
    A realization seemed to shadow across her pretty features and reshape them into pure sorrow. Her hands covered her face and she began to