PROLOGUE. (continued 2)

Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest.

The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.

V.

He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept a minute, but at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting eyes through the brown dusk of the hollow, he was confused at seeing the palmetto leaves at the entrance plainly visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that it was broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly, a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and made him gasp with pain. He remained for a minute supporting himself on his hands, and then slowly and painfully arose. Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even worse off in body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were much swollen where the ropes of the bucking had cut them. He felt as if he had been switched all over with nettles, from the stings and scratches of the thorns and briers through which he had travelled. His face pained him especially, the atoms of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its wounds and bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at that moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar. His flesh was raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost the first thing he did was to tie one of the pieces of cotton cloth around his neck for the edge of the iron to rest on. Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and fro, gasping and panting at every step with pain.

After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier, and stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him that Nancy must have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles he had found in the hollow confirmed his belief. To get away from the swamp was his fixed purpose, and in that land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat, he might avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.

Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the question was, where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree to commence a search for it, he saw it right at the base of the trunk under the palmettoes. But Nancy’s periagua was a canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of slender wattles. Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some visiting tribe from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the boats Antony had ever seen among them were periaguas. At all events here it was, and elated with its discovery, the fugitive instantly brought forth the paddle, the hatchet, the bowie-knife, the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and placed them in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton cloth hanging out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it came—an old blue cotton gown. Turning over the moss, he uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an old pair of grey trowsers, a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and one stocking. Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him with a change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers into the canoe, and lifting the latter, plunged out through the palmettoes into the forest.

A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight that it was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had he been in the enforced habits of plantation life to rise at daybreak, that on waking in the hollow he naturally thought he had awakened at the usual morning hour. He shuddered now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost, when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting, might be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte would, in his burning lust for vengeance, hunt the swamp for weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and he must at once speed away.

He stood for a moment debating which direction to take, when looking down he happened to see a spot where the earth had been harrowed by the claws of some wild beast, and upon the scratches was the distinct imprint of a naked foot. It came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue a track, in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping along painfully with the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously, for by the sudden slipping and rustling in the grass and herbage he knew that snakes were around him, suddenly his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole frame. He had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay in a faint glimmer of sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth. The sluggish reptile quivered slightly throughout its mottled length, and lifting its head with venom in its sparkling eyes and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and swiftly slid from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that he was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite of himself at every buzzard that flew from his path, or small animal that crossed it, and feeling that everything was watching him, and that the multitudinous chatter of the birds that filled the forest was concerning him, he went on his way. Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from his path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou. A fallen tree lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half way across; a rotten log floated in the water; stumps and snags projected here and there; waifs of moss, slivers of branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of forest debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the shadows.

Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself with the old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers. Then laying the canoe on the water, where it lightly danced, he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle in the middle, and plying the blades first on one side and then on the other, shot slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.

Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to left, and darted with an uncertain forward motion, trembling beneath him like a living thing that shared his agitation. Black banks of mud, pierced here and there with alligator holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps and masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees and trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy pride, and the vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness of massive trunks uplifting their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden branches, spread and loomed in solemn and splendid confusion on either side as the boat lightly darted on its sinuous course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the margin as it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from the banks squawking and screaming; strange birds of gorgeous plumage flew rustling through the branches; scarlet-gilled black buzzards rose and soared with broad and steady wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped and swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward, now on one side, now on the other, on sped the brown canoe, while the shadows grew inkier on the sombre water, and again under the red reflection of the sky, the dull bayou became a stream of blood.

Awed by the solemn desolation of the scene, the gloomy color of the water, the gathering darkness of the wooded fen, the motions and the voices all around; troubled at the thought of the long and perilous distance that stretched between him and his far bourn of safety; yet with a fearful joy and a sustaining hope within, the fugitive oared his swift darting skiff at length into the river he had swam last the day before. The red glow had died from sky and water, and the moon silvered greyly the stream as he paddled on between the black forest on either side. Heading his prow to the east, and plying his paddle vigorously, he flew lightly up the stream. Voices of bird and beast called and answered weirdly in the darkness of the black shores; trees towered and leaned in ambiguous sable shapes over the dusky stream, and watched him as he shot swiftly by; the solemn sky spread far above him like a doubtful thought, half-boding, yet clearing slowly into deep-withdrawn tranquillity, in the increasing lustre of the tawny moon. Overarched and palisaded by the phantom sentience of the hour, his dark skiff, gliding and darting with light tremors and waverings still held its way like a dumb intelligence over the mysterious water.

Hours went on, and save the scattered hooting and screeching of owls in the forest, and the occasional clacking of some vagrant bat whirling by, the moonlit night was still. Only once the fugitive oared his canoe in to the shore, where on a low projecting bluff under a great tree, he lit a small fire, and hastily parching some corn in the pan, ate a hurried meal. Then slaking the fire, he entered the canoe again, and paddled on.

An hour or two later he turned the skiff into a narrow bayou which debouched into the stream, thus changing his course to the north. His object was to gain the Red River, where he hoped to smuggle himself on board some steamboat, and getting to New Orleans, escape from the steamboat, and hide himself in the hold of some northern vessel. It was his former plan, and he still clung to it with tenacity, bitterly aware of its hazards and dangers, yet unable to think of a better. The bayou he was now in was very narrow, hemmed in on either side by the forest and the fen, and much obstructed by stumps, snags, fallen trees and lodgments of logs. To steer his course through these in the uncertain darkness, for the branches almost shut out the moonlight, was difficult, and several times he was obliged to clamber on the fallen timber, and pull the canoe over, or shove aside the huddled floodwood to clear a passage. But his efforts brought him at length to a sluggish stream, which he judged to be the Pacoudrie—the stream he had swam first in his escape the day before, but at a point several miles below the Lafitte plantation. He was now approaching dangerous ground, and his heart began to beat faster. Turning his prow eastward again, he paddled down the stream, looking for another debouching bayou. He soon came upon one, into which he turned, heading north, and through which his passage was as dark and impeded as before. He exerted himself to the utmost, and at last, heated and panting, he saw that he was leaving the morass, and that the moonlit ground, thinly scattered over with trees, and thickly covered with verdurous underwood, was gradually rising on either side of him. The bayou, too, grew deeper and less impeded, and presently he saw on his left, beyond a cluster of huge trees, the grain of a plantation, and further up, a mansion with outbuildings. Who lived there he did not know—he only knew that he was again in the region of his enemies. Light thrills shot through his heated blood, and the canoe yawed and trembled beneath him, as if conscious of danger. Paddling forward, he saw before him in the clear moonlight, for the trees on either side were thinly scattered now, a huge trunk fallen sheer across the stream, sloping down obliquely, with its crown of branches dipping in the water, and barring half the passage. From the other side, crossing the first trunk, a leafless tree, withered or blasted, had also fallen, and lay, dipped in the water, half way across, with its broken boughs sticking upward like jagged spikes or horns. Steering to the left of these, with the intention of shooting through the space under the large trunk, he gave three or four vigorous strokes of the paddle on either side of the skiff. The canoe darted forward, quivering with the impetus of the strokes—stopped suddenly with a tearing and griding shock, and yawed around, with the water welling up swiftly through its bottom. Antony, who was kneeling on one knee, had just time to spring up, catch at the trunk before him, and lift himself up on it. When he turned, the rim of the canoe was settling in the water. It had struck one of the jagged spikes just below the surface, which had ripped its bottom, and it had gone down forever.

Sitting on the tree, stupefied at this unexpected accident, Antony watched the circling ripples on the moonlit water where his boat had sunk, and thought with bitter regret that he was now without a single weapon to fight his way against any opposing white man, or to end his own existence, should the odds be against him. His hatchet had sunk with the boat, and his knife also. With a fierce imprecation, he rose, ran up the trunk, sprang ashore, and pausing only to wrench off a branch, and strip it of its leaves for a club to defend himself, rushed on through the underwood.

Heading to the northeast, he gained the plantation, and running over rows of corn and springing cotton-plant, pale in the paling moon, he struck upon a fenced road lying between the plantation, with another road diverging from it in the course he was travelling. Into the latter he turned, but afraid to take the open path, he kept within the fences and hedges skirting its side, ready if he saw anybody in the distance to hide in the rows, or if anybody came upon him, to fight till he was killed.

Rushing on, haggard with apprehension and desperate resolution, with his teeth set, his large nostrils dilated, and his glaring eyes roving warily about him, he came to a plantation divided from the one he was on by a hedge of the osage-orange, and with a similar hedge skirting the road. To break through this would be difficult, so he took the road and ran on, with the fresh wind of the coming morning blowing upon him, and increasing his fear with the thought of the new dangers the daybreak would bring. It was a large plantation, and it took him some time to arrive at its terminus, at which a road diverged from the one on which he was journeying. He reached this road, and there, clad in shabby light clothes, and coming down the path, not three yards distant from him, was a man!

Antony swung up his club, and stood with opened nostrils and glaring eyes, his black face alive with fierce courage. The man halted, and looked at him with a sullen scowl. In the blank pause all life seemed to have died from the air, and the moon lay faded in a vacant, sky, ghast and grey in the pale light of the morning. The man was a large, gaunt fellow, with a harsh and sallow taciturn face, but to the dark, half demented fancy of the fugitive, he dimly seemed a devil, and the place was still vaguely Hell.

“See here, nigger,” he said, in a stern, strident voice, “yer a runaway. There’s their name as owns yer on yer collar, and I know Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, want yer. I’m goin’ down in the first boat, and yer comin’ with me, right away, and no fuss. What yo’ say, nigger?”

He drew a revolver from his breast, and held it idly, watching the fugitive with a scowl. Sense flickered through the mind of Antony. Here was a chance to get safely down the river—beyond, a chance to give his captor the slip when he reached the city. He flung his club away.

“I’ll go with ye, Marster,” he said, sullenly.

The man put up his pistol.

“What’s yer name, boy?” he asked.

“Bill, Marster.”

“Bill, eh? You’re the Fugitive Slave Bill, I suppose,” said the man, with a dull grin.

“Yes, Marster.”

“Well, Bill, I collect bills for a livin’, and I reckon I’ve collected you, Bill. Hope I’ll collect something on yer, too. Come along.”

Antony followed him. Not a word further was said on either side. Meanwhile, around them the pallor of the sky lightened into daybreak; horns sounded over the plantations; the black gangs were coming forth into the fields on every side; the birds darted and sang; the fragrant wind blew freshly from the east, and the life of day began anew.

Weary, and sore, and aching, with insane fancies flitting through the horrible lethargy which was creeping on his mind, Antony followed his taciturn captor, and just as the rising sun shot a low, broad splendor over the landscape, they came to a solitary landing-place, with a shanty and a wood-pile, on the border of the wide, gleaming river.

It was all a dim, dread dream. In it came a huge monster, puffing, and snorting, and clanking, vomiting clouds of black smoke, and lifting and washing back the drifting trees and logs and refuse on the shining surge. Then a dream of hurry and tumult, a great heaving mass, a swarm of people, an air blind with light and heavy with smoke, a roar of voices laughing, and talking, and hallooing, the clanging of a bell, piles of cotton and goods of all sorts, the clank of engines, the wallowing of water, ponderous snorting, and heaving, and surging, all mixed together in inextricable confusion, and he who dreamed it vaguely knew that he was sitting, like one drugged, on a heaving deck, with heaps of merchandise around him. Gradually he sank away into a still heavier lethargy, in which everything became even more dim and distant, and from thence he slid into a blank and stupid sleep.

Once again the dream seemed to swim heavily into that death-like slumber—a vague, spectral dream, in which some one gave him a hunch of corn bread, which he ate slowly in a glimmering light, remotely conscious of a dark figure standing near, of distant voices, a far-off snorting and clanking, a shuddering motion beneath him, and formless bulks around him. Presently it drowsily dissolved into darkness and silence.

Like one who dreams of awaking, he awoke again, and stupidly strove to remember where he was and what had befallen him. In the dull gleam of a hanging lantern, he saw masses of bales and boxes, casks and furniture, and miscellaneous merchandise, lying in murky gloom. A few dark, uncouth forms of sleeping men, heavily breathing, were strewn about in various grotesque attitudes on the piles of cotton. In the stillness, he heard the regular snort and clank of the engine, the rushing of the water, and felt with a dull giddiness the floor rocking and swaying in long, regular undulations.

Somehow, a minute afterward, he found himself out on the edge of the deck, sick and dizzy, steadying himself against a heap of bales, and looking out on a broad, dim river, rolling in mighty, languid surges under a large, low, yellow moon. Logs and trees and masses of chaff and refuse lifted blackly in the tawny light on the long swells. All around the water fled by, churned into a mill-race of seething froth and foam. Beyond was a huge steamboat; black smoke trailing from its double funnels; fire flaring from them and from its escape-pipes; balls of light gleaming from hanging lanterns here and there; light streaming out from the rows of oblong windows, and from every hole and cranny; the strong current beaten up into a flood of foam beneath its wheel; and the darks and lights of an inverted phantom steamboat hung below it in the water. Far away were low, black shores, with here and there a gaunt spectral tree, and dull lights glimmering. He was on the mighty tide of a river which ran through Hell.

Sick and dizzy, and with a horror on his mind, he staggered back with the heavy drowse on all his faculties, through the tortuous lane of cotton-bales, and sinking down on one of them, fell into his former lethargy.

He did not sleep through the night, but lay in utter torpor, thinking of nothing, fearing and hoping nothing, only vaguely conscious of where he was, and of the forms around him. Overstrung for many years with the unnatural toils of a slave, and still more tensely overstrung with the terrible labors of his journey through the morass—overstrung both in body and spirit, as few but slaves ever are—he had sunk back, now that a season of relaxation had come, into lassitude as excessive as were the fatigues and agitations of which it was the reaction. Safe for the present, with no immediate stimulus to urge him into activity, he lay, body and spirit, as in the sentient sleep of the tomb.

Toward morning he sank away again into a heavy, dreamless slumber. Once during the day he dreamed that he was aroused by some one whom he did not recognize, and bidden to come along and get something to eat. In his dream he tried to shake the stupor from his bleared eyes, which even the dim light among the bales pained, and to obey. But the drowse was heavy upon him, and he could only mumble out that he didn’t want to eat, and the dream instantly dissolved in oblivion. He was left undisturbed, for his captor was not without pity for him, and saw that he was terribly fatigued.

But late that night, when midnight was two hours gone, and the moon was westering palely from the sky, the trump of Liberty or Death sounded again in the ear of the fugitive, and his spirit arose from its tomb. A hand shook him, a voice shouted in his ear that they were near the city, and instantly springing to his feet, with fresh blood leaping through his veins, with new pulses throbbing in his heart, and all his faculties awake and alive, and armed with their utmost cunning, their fullest courage, and their most desperate resolution, he followed his captor out on deck. The boat was within a mile of the city, which lay beyond a forest of masts and hulls, and scattered lights hung in the rigging, or glimmering on the levee, dark and silent, with its roofs and spires massed against the purple sky, and glittering in the moon. The night was hot and still, and a heavy languor hung over the great breadth of regular rolling swells. Ships lay at anchor all about the stream, lifting with the lifting of the surge, and here and there a flat-boat with lights on board, and the men plying their long sweeps, lazily steered its way on the drift between the hulls. Antony watched the scene, with his heart fiercely beating at the thought of the coming trial.

Meanwhile the boat, with her bell ringing, was slowly clanking and snorting on through the foaming and brattling flood around her bows and wheels, and the passengers were pouring forth, men, women and children, on her decks. The fugitive stood silently by his captor, on the lower forward deck, amidst the tumult and crowding of the risen multitude, biding his time. The moment the boat touched the levee he was determined to quietly slip aside from his companion and lose himself in the crowd. To this end he stood a little to one side of him, watching his every movement.

Suddenly the clatter of conversation and the trampling of feet were stricken still by a wild yell, above which was heard the slow, impassive snort and clank of the engine, and the brattling wash of the water. Then burst forth a shrill clamor of cries and screams from the after deck, followed by a trampling rush which threw all forward, as by a galvanic shock, into mad confusion; then behind the pouring crowd, suddenly lightened a red flare, followed by a tremendous volume of black smoke, and at once, amidst terrific disorder, uprose a dreadful storm of yells and screams from the horror-stricken multitude. The next instant the uproar of voices was stifled in a multitudinous choking and gasping, as the thick, poisonous smoke swept over the decks, and presently up shot a sheeting burst of clear flame, with shrivelling ringlets of black vapor writhing and vanishing away in it, lighting the ghastly pallor of the hundreds of terrified faces, all turned one way, and throwing its lurid glare on the churning froth and the lifting swells, and on the myriad masts and spars and rigging of the surrounding vessels, which started out suddenly in lines and bars of tawny splendor against a background of gloom.

Even in that awful moment Antony did not lose sight of his captor. With his whole soul fiercely bent on getting away from him, he saw him start back and shout with terror. With his eye fixed upon him, he heard the rapid jabber of a terrified man behind him shrieking out that a lantern had fallen and broken, setting fire to a pool of turpentine which had leaked from a barrel on the after deck, and the fire spreading at once to the barrel, it had burst and flooded the boat with flame. Still watching him, he heard the screamed order to reverse the engines, and amidst howls and cries of anguish and despair, and cursing and praying, and the heavy thump of men and women falling in swoon upon the deck, or trampling and fighting over each other in their frantic desperation, while the advancing flame leaped and writhed, crackling and bristling and roaring furiously on—amidst all the horror and Bedlam confusion of that minute—for it was but one—standing still, with his eye riveted on his captor, he heard the ponderous clank, the long wash and wallow, and felt the boat drift backward to gain the middle of the stream. That instant he sprang backward, and rushing through the crowd, kicked off his shoes, and leaped into the river.

He emerged presently from his plunge, amidst a shower of fiery cinders, with the lifting surges all aglare around him, and struck boldly forward for the levee, seeing at a glance the burning mass drift behind him, and all the illuminated ships at the piers and in the stream suddenly alive with shouting figures. Turning for an instant, and treading water, he saw the boat clanking backward, with her black funnels rising from a leaping and coiling mountain of smoke and flame, her passengers all huddled forward in a dense, shrieking mass, black against the fiery glow, and figures jumping into the water—which was already dotted with dark, swimming forms, and looked like a turbulent sea of flame ignited from the spectre of a burning boat below its surface. Among the swimming figures there was, perhaps, not one but was his enemy—not one who would not hale him back to the bondage from which he was struggling away. Turning again, he swam on, heading against the ponderous current which would bear him down past the city and out to sea. Boats were putting out in all directions from ships in the stream, and from the shore, to pick up the swimmers, many of whom were swimming in front of him, or clinging to pieces of drift-wood or furniture. To avoid being picked up by any of the boats was a necessary part of his task, for they, too, were manned by his enemies. Reaching a large brig anchored in the stream, with a few sailors standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging, watching the burning vessel, he resolved to cling to its rudder a few moments to recover breath, and as he approached it, looking up through the shadow, made luminous by the wan light of the moon, and the reflected glare of the water, he read on the stern, in white letters, the words, “Soliman, Boston.” His heart throbbed wildly, and clinging to the rudder under an overhanging boat, he listened to the talking on the deck above him, and presently heard a voice say:

“Devilish lucky we weren’t set afire, Jones, and we just ready to sail.”

Just ready to sail! He heard those words with his brain aflame. His chance had come. Setting his knees to the slippery rudder, he began to climb. It was hard work, for the helm was coated with sea-slime, but at length he got his toes upon the slight projection of one of the iron clamps that bound the wood together, and scrambling upward, laid hold of the boat swinging astern, and softly clambering in, remained still, and listened. He had not been discovered. The talking above him was still going on, and presently he heard the tramp of the two men as they moved away forward. Raising himself in the boat, he cautiously peered in at the cabin window. A swinging lamp was burning within, and all was quiet. He put in his head, looked around him for a moment, and then stealthily got in. Going to the cabin door, he peered out on the deck. Everybody was at the bows, standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging in the wild glare, watching the steamboat, which was now one mass of leaping flame, half a mile away up the river. Cries and screams and shouts were resounding from the water in all directions. Looking at the deck, he saw that the hatch nearest him was open, and nerved to desperation, and almost choking with excitement, he went lightly forward, his bare feet making no sound, and, unseen by any one, so intent was the general gaze on the conflagration, stooped and dropped into the hold.

He fell on a cotton-bale, three or four feet from the top, and lay in the thick darkness, reeking with sweat, and listening, with a wild jumping in his throat, for any sound that might tell him his entrance had been observed. He heard none. The talking went on above him, and it was all about the burning steamboat. He knew that he must not remain where he was, for there he could be seen, and in a moment he began to grope for a hiding-place. He was in a sort of square well, formed by the cotton-bales around him. Above them was a horizontal space under the deck, and clambering out of the well, he wormed himself into this, a few feet forward, and lay, panting and fatigued, hot, wet, hungry and thirsty, half stifled by the foul and musty air of the hold, and by the smell of the bilge, but safe for the present.

He lay in a sort of stupor, and gradually heard all sounds die away. For a little while his mind was filled with strange recollections of the passions and events of the last hour; then lying prone in the foul and musty darkness, he lapsed into a sleep haunted with dreams, in which he was again rushing through the swamp, which somehow changed into rolling water on which a steamboat was burning, and he was holding up Madame Lafitte, who suddenly turned and bit him on the hand. Starting up in the thick darkness, he struck his head against the deck, and then remembering where he was, lay still. The hatch had been closed. In the darkness he heard light scampering and squealing, and felt the ship shuddering beneath him.

He forgot his dream in the wild whirl of emotion with which he became aware that the vessel was on her way. Presently he felt a sort of pricking in his hand, and touching the spot, found that it was wet, and, as he again heard the scampering and squealing, he knew that a rat had bitten him. Startled a little at the new danger of being set upon by these vermin, and suspicious of poison, he sucked the wound, resolving to keep awake now as long as he could. He did not know how long he had slept, but he could hear the incessant snort, snort, snort, of a steamboat, with the long unbroken wash of the vessel, and knew that the brig was in the tow of a steam-tug, and so not yet out of the river.

At length there was a change in the noises. Orders were shouted above, heavy feet were rushing about, there was a bustle of pulling and hauling, griding and flapping, thudding of ropes on deck, chanting of sailors, amidst the receding snort of the steam-tug, and in the darkness, Antony felt the vessel lean and roll and stagger with a sound of swiftly rushing water, and knew that she was standing out to sea.

Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? That was his constant thought now, and it came in those words to his mind. He knew the penalties imposed on any captain who took away a fugitive in his vessel. He had thought of them before, but dimly; now they came to him vividly, and he trembled. He was resolved to remain in the hold as long as he could, but he knew the time would come when he must leave his hiding-place, and face the captain. His plan was to tell him all he had suffered, to show him his wounds and scars, to beg him on his knees not to send him back to the Hell he had escaped from. Who would do it? Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it?

Soon the motion of the vessel threw him, already sickened by the horrible smells and closeness of the hold, into agonies of sea-sickness, and he lay on the bales vomiting violently, and feeling as if his soul were rending his aching body asunder. By and by, he crawled down into the well-like cavity under the hatch, where there was a little more room to breathe in, and there he lay without food, without drink, almost without air, for three days.

Days of sickness too loathsome to be described, too dreadful for permitted language to convey. Days of utter prostration, of griping pain, of wrenching convulsions, of horror indescribable, of tortured death-in-life. Days when the ropy and putrid air was sucked into the feeble lungs as if it were some strangling substance; when the oppressed heart beat slowly with dull knocks as though it would burst the bosom, and the bosom labored as though it were loaded down with tons of iron. Days when sleep came down like a weight of lead upon the brain, and struggled with infernal dreams, and was broken to fight off an ever-returning swarm of rats—invisible vermin that swarmed over his invisible body when it lay still, and were heard squeaking and pattering off in the sightless darkness when he feebly flung about his limbs to beat them away. Days whose mad, disgustful horror was desperately borne for the hope of liberty, for the hatred of slavery—borne till he could bear it no longer, and he resolved to beat upon the hatch and cry aloud to let those above him know what a hell of agony raged beneath their feet.

How long he had been immured he did not know. Count time by anguish, and it might have been centuries. Fearful of discovering himself till he was too far from the land from which he had fled to be returned, he had resolved to endure till endurance became impossible. For this he had clung to life, for this he had silently borne the horrors of his tomb, for this he had striven a hundred times against the desire to end his imprisonment by shouting aloud to those above him. Now when heavy torpor and gradual giddiness were stealing upon him, and the instinct of his soul told him death was drawing near, he roused himself for the long deferred effort.

The ship was staggering heavily, and he heard the trampling of feet on the deck as, with dizzily reeling brain, he feebly and slowly crawled up on his hands and knees. His strength was almost gone. An infant newly born could have been hardly more helpless than he found himself. He slowly lifted one hand to lay it on the bales beside him—lifted it a few inches like something over which he had no command—and it fell heavily, and losing his balance he tumbled down on his side. An awful feeling stole across his mind that he had delayed too long—that his resolution had outlived his physical powers. Turning over on his back, feebly panting, slowly suffocating, he drew in his breath for a wild cry for help. It rushed from him in a hoarse whistling whisper. His voice had left him!

He lay still now, painfully breathing, but resigned to die. Quietly—quietly—the fears and desires of the present, the hopes of the future withdrew, and the vision of all his past floated softly through his tranquil brain. It faded, and he lay rushing on a fast-rushing tide, and dilated with a wonderful and mystic change. Power and beauty and joy ineffable began to glow and spread divinely through his being with the vague beauteous glimmer of a transcendant life afar. All fierce and dark and sorrowful passions and emotions gone—all sense of pain and horror and disgust fled forever—himself happier, greater, nobler than he had ever dreamed—he lay swiftly drifting to the last repose.

What sound was it that jarred so dully on his failing ear? What sudden light was it that fell upon him? What faces were those that looked on him so strangely from above, and vanished with cries that brought down darkness and silence on him once more?

O blue sky of the nineteenth century, what is this? O pale, fresh light streaming into the noisome hold, what is this? O wonder-stricken, silent faces, gazing aghast upon that swart and loathsome figure lying in the shallow well, with an iron collar on its neck, what does this mean?

The men stood staring at the motionless body on the bales below them, and then, lost in a trance of wonder, stared at each other. Their wild amazement at the sight which met their eyes when they had unbattened the hatch, had burst forth in one cry, and then left them still and dumb. Presently there was a sound of heavy, hurrying feet, and the captain, a short, powerfully-built man, came flying over the deck, with strong excitement working in his sun-burnt face, reached the hold, looked in, turned livid with rage, slapped his straw hat down on his head with both hands, and rushed away cursing and raving like a madman. It was highly natural. A commercial Christian of the nineteenth century breed, the captain had been educated to think of nothing but his ship and trade, and his special reflection was of the penalties that would ensue if it became known that he had carried away a slave from New Orleans.

Recovering from their amazement, the sailors, with uncouth and profane ejaculations of horror and pity, lifted the inanimate body of Antony, disgusting even to their rude senses, and touching even to their rude sensibilities, out of the hold. They had hardly laid it on deck when the captain came rushing back again, shouting with oaths an order for a look-out up aloft, with the hope of meeting some vessel bound for the city he had left that would take the slave back. Then giving the prostrate body a furious kick, he rushed away again, storming and stamping and swearing.

At the direction of the mate, the sailors took the faintly-breathing body of Antony forward to the galley, where the black cook busied himself in reviving the fugitive. Half a dozen times a day the captain came to the spot where the feeble man reclined, and glared at him without saying a word. On the third day, Antony being then weak but able to stand and talk, the captain demanded him to give an account of himself.

Feebly standing before him, with all the vigor gone from his emaciated form, and with the deep marks of awful suffering graven on his wasted lineaments, Antony told his story. As he finished, imploring the captain in earnest and broken tones not to send him back, the mate, who stood by, turned away with his mouth twitching, saying it was a damned shame. The captain burst into a fit of passion, and stamped on the deck, gesticulating with clenched hands.

“A damned shame, is it, Mr. Jones?” he roared, perfectly livid with rage. “I should think it was! Rather! A blasted nigger to smuggle his ugly carcass aboard my brig—what d’ye think they’ll say about it at Orleans, and what’ll they do about it, Mr. Jones, and what’ll Atkins say when he hears of it, Mr. Jones, and a load of cotton aboard from the very house whose junior partner owns this dingy curse, Mr. Jones! Look at the name of the house on his neck, man. Blast ye,” he howled, turning upon Antony, and shaking both fists at him, “I’d send ye back, you beggar, if they were to fry ye in your own black blood when they got ye! Send ye back? If I don’t, may I be eternally”—

He finished the sentence by a gasp, and dashed both clenched fists into the haggard and imploring face of the fugitive, who fell to the deck, covered with blood. Shouting and cursing, the infuriated captain leaped on him, and seizing him by the hair, beat his head against the planks; then jumped to his feet, capering like a madman, and brandishing his clenched fists. The mate stood looking away to the horizon, with a mute, flushed face, and two or three of the sailors standing not far distant, dumb witnesses of this brutal scene, glanced at each other with mutinous brows. Striding off a dozen paces, the captain turned again, bringing down his clenched fist with a slap into the palm of his hand, and stamping with his right foot on the deck as he shouted:

“Keep a sharp look-out, Mr. Jones! The first vessel that heaves in sight for New Orleans shall take him if it costs me a hundred dollars. And if he gets to Boston, I’ll tie him hand and foot, and send him or fetch him back the first chance, or my name’s not Bangham!”

He foamed off into the cabin. Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? Antony had received his answer.