The dark fell rapidly.  You could hear the trees in the River Swamp crying out as the wind tormented them.  On a night like this, with lightning snaking through it and wild wind trying to tear the heart out of its thin cypresses, and the cane-brake rustling ominously in its unchancy black stretches, one might believe that the place was haunted, as the negroes said it was.  Daddy Neptune was moved to tell Peter some of his own experiences with the River Swamp.  He spoke, between puffs of his corn-cob pipe, of the night Something had come out of it—­pitterpat! pitterpat!—­right at his heels.  It had followed him to the very edge of his home clearing.  Daddy Neptune wasn’t exactly afraid, but he knew that Something hadn’t any business to be pitterpattering at his heels, so he had turned around and said: 

“Ef you-all come out o’ hebben, you ‘s wastin’ good time ’yuh.  Ef Dey-all lef’ you come out o’ hell, you bes’ git right back whah you b’longs.  One ways, I ain’t got nothin’ I kin tell you; t’other ways, you ain’t got nothin’ I ’s gwine to let you tell me.  I ’s axin’ you to git.  En,” finished Neptune, “dat t’ing done went right out—­whish!—­same lak I ‘s tellin’ you!  Yessuh! hit went spang out!” He threw another chunk of fatwood on the fire, and watched the smoky flame go dancing up the chimney.  In the red glow he had the aspect of a kindly Titan.

“It never bothered you again, Daddy Nep?” Peter was always curious about these experiences.  He had a glimmer that negroes are nearer to certain Powers than other folks are, and although he wasn’t superstitious, he wasn’t skeptical, either.

“Never bothered me a-tall, less’n dat ’s whut ‘s been meddlin’ wid my fowls, whichin ef I catches it, I aims to blow its head plum off, ghostes or no ghostes,” said the old man, stoutly.

“Ghosts don’t steal chickens.  I reckon it’s a wild-cat gets yours.  I heard one scream in the swamp not so long since.”

“Well, I aims to git Mistuh Wildcat, den.  I done got me a couple o’ guinea-fowls for watch, en dey sho does set up a mighty potrackin’ w’en anything strange comes a-snoopin’ roun’ de yahd.”

After a while Daddy Neptune put away his pipe and took down from a shelf his big battered Bible, and Peter read the Twenty-first and Twenty-second chapters of Revelation, to which the old man listened with clasped hands and an uplifted face, his lips moving soundlessly as he repeated to himself certain of the words: 

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away....  He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God and he shall be my son ...

“I was born in slaveryment,” said the old man, audibly.