“Yer master’s some at swearin’.  Heow many, neow, hes he like you, down to Georgy?”

The boatman’s bony face was gathering a woful pity.  He had enlisted to free the Uncle Toms, and carry God’s vengeance to the Legrees.  Here they were, a pair of them.

Ben squinted another critical survey of the “miss’able Linkinite.”

“How many wells hev yer poisoned since yer set out?” he muttered.

The sentry stopped.

“How many ‘longin’ to de Lamars?  ‘Bout as many as der’s dam’ Yankees in Richmond ’baccy-houses!”

Something in Dave’s shrewd, whitish eye warned him off.

“Ki yi! yer white nigger, yer!” he chuckled, shuffling down the stubble.

Dave clicked his musket,—­then, choking down an oath into a grim Methodist psalm, resumed his walk, looking askance at the coarse-moulded face of the prisoner peering through the bars, and the diamond studs in his shirt,—­bought with human blood, doubtless.  The man was the black curse of slavery itself in the flesh, in his thought somehow, and he hated him accordingly.  Our men of the Northwest have enough brawny Covenanter muscle in their religion to make them good haters for opinion’s sake.

Lamar, the prisoner, watched him with a lazy drollery in his sluggish black eyes.  It died out into sternness, as he looked beyond the sentry.  He had seen this Cheat country before; this very plantation was his grandfather’s a year ago, when he had come up from Georgia here, and loitered out the summer months with his Virginia cousins, hunting.  That was a pleasant summer!  Something in the remembrance of it flashed into his eyes, dewy, genial; the man’s leather-covered face reddened like a child’s.  Only a year ago,—­and now——­The plantation was Charley Dorr’s now, who had married Ruth.  This very shed he and Dorr had planned last spring, and now Charley held him a prisoner in it.  The very thought of Charley Dorr warmed his heart.  Why, he could thank God there were such men.  True grit, every inch of his little body!  There, last summer, how he had avoided Ruth until the day when he (Lamar) was going away!—­then he told him he meant to try and win her.  “She cared most for you always,” Lamar had said, bitterly; “why have you waited so long?” “You loved her first, John, you know.”  That was like a man!  He remembered that even that day, when his pain was breathless and sharp, the words made him know that Dorr was fit to be her husband.

Dorr was his friend.  The word meant much to John Lamar.  He thought less meanly of himself, when he remembered it.  Charley’s prisoner!  An odd chance!  Better that than to have met in battle.  He thrust back the thought, the sweat oozing out on his face,—­something within him muttering, “For Liberty!  I would have killed him, so help me God!”

He had brought despatches to General Lee, that he might see Charley, and the old place, and—­Ruth again; there was a gnawing hunger in his heart to see them.  Fool! what was he to them?  The man’s face grew slowly pale, as that of a savage or an animal does, when the wound is deep and inward.