Keeping the sheriff under cover of the revolver, the mulatto followed him up the stairs.  The sheriff expected the prisoner to lock him into the cell and make his own escape.  He had about come to the conclusion that the best thing he could do under the circumstances was to submit quietly, and take his chances of recapturing the prisoner after the alarm had been given.  The sheriff had faced death more than once upon the battlefield.  A few minutes before, well armed, and with a brick wall between him and them he had dared a hundred men to fight; but he felt instinctively that the desperate man confronting him was not to be trifled with, and he was too prudent a man to risk his life against such heavy odds.  He had Polly to look after, and there was a limit beyond which devotion to duty would be quixotic and even foolish.

“I want to get away,” said the prisoner, “and I don’t want to be captured; for if I am I know I will be hung on the spot.  I am afraid,” he added somewhat reflectively, “that in order to save myself I shall have to kill you.”

“Good God!” exclaimed the sheriff in involuntary terror; “you would not kill the man to whom you owe your own life.”

“You speak more truly than you know,” replied the mulatto.  “I indeed owe my life to you.”

The sheriff started, he was capable of surprise, even in that moment of extreme peril.  “Who are you?” he asked in amazement.

“Tom, Cicely’s son,” returned the other.  He had closed the door and stood talking to the sheriff through the grated opening.  “Don’t you remember Cicely—­Cicely whom you sold, with her child, to the speculator on his way to Alabama?”

The sheriff did remember.  He had been sorry for it many a time since.  It had been the old story of debts, mortgages, and bad crops.  He had quarreled with the mother.  The price offered for her and her child had been unusually large, and he had yielded to the combination of anger and pecuniary stress.

“Good God!” he gasped, “you would not murder your own father?”

“My father?” replied the mulatto.  “It were well enough for me to claim the relationship, but it comes with poor grace from you to ask anything by reason of it.  What father’s duty have you ever performed for me?  Did you give me your name, or even your protection?  Other white men gave their colored sons freedom and money, and sent them to the free States. You sold me to the rice swamps.”

“I at least gave you the life you cling to,” murmured the sheriff.

“Life?” said the prisoner, with a sarcastic laugh.  “What kind of a life?  You gave me your own blood, your own features,—­no man need look at us together twice to see that,—­and you gave me a black mother.  Poor wretch!  She died under the lash, because she had enough womanhood to call her soul her own.  You gave me a white man’s spirit, and you made me a slave, and crushed it out.”

“But you are free now,” said the sheriff.  He had not doubted, could not doubt, the mulatto’s word.  He knew whose passions coursed beneath that swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes opposite his own.  He saw in this mulatto what he himself might have become had not the safeguards of parental restraint and public opinion been thrown around him.