They looked at each other embarrassed,
like they had been ketched at something ornery.
And they went out one at a time, saying good night
to the hotel-keeper and in the most pinted way
taking no notice of us at all. It certainly was a
chill. We sees something is wrong, and we begins
to have a notion of what it is.
The hotel-keeper, he spits out his chew, and goes
behind his little counter and takes a five-cent cigar
out of his little show case and bites the end off
careful. Then he leans his elbows onto his counter
and reads our names to himself out of the register
book, and looks at us, and from us to the names,
and from the names to us, like he is trying to figger
out how he come to let us write 'em there. Then
he wants to know where we come from before we
come to Atlanta, where we had registered from.
We tells him we is from the North. He lights
his cigar like he didn't think much of that cigar
and sticks it in his mouth and looks at us so long
in an absent-minded kind of way it goes out.
Then he says we orter go back North.
"Why?" asts the doctor.
He chewed his cigar purty nigh up to the middle
of it before he answered, and when he spoke it was
a soft kind of a drawl--not mad or loud--but
like they was sorrowful thoughts working in him.
"Yo' all done struck the wo'st paht o' the South
to peddle yo' niggah medicine in, sah.
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