“Dey ’ll git me, dey ’ll git me!” he croaked.

Peter would have flung himself upon the wretch, to reach for his throat with bare hands; but something in Neptune’s face stopped him.  Neptune’s bigness seemed to fill the whole room.  He drew a deep breath, and with one movement jerked the door wide.

“Run down de paff by de fowl-house,” he said sharply.  “Den—­hit ’s de swamp for you.”

Peter turned sick.  Was Neptune like all other—­niggers?  Hadn’t he the—­proper sense of what this devil had done?

Jake leaped for the door, cleared the steps at a bound, and was flying down the path.  Neptune took one forward step, filling the doorway.  He lifted the shot-gun to his shoulder.  Just as the fugitive neared the fowl-house, the gun spoke.  The flying figure leaped high in the air, and then sprawled out and was suddenly still and inert.  The guinea-hens set up a deafening potracking, and the cooped fowls squawked and flapped.  Above all the noise they made rose the bloodhound’s note.

It was done so quickly, it was so inevitable, that Peter could only stand and blink.  He thought, sickly, that the very earth should shudder away from the soiling touch of that appalling carrion.  But the earth was the one thing that would receive Jake unprotestingly.  He lay on his face, his arms outflung, and from the gaping hole between his shoulders a dark stream welled.  The indifferent earth, the uncaring grass, received it.  The wind came out of the swamp on mincing feet and danced over him, and fluttered his torn shirt-sleeve.

Stonily, voicelessly, Neptune stood in the cabin door, staring at that which lay in the pathway.  Then he lowered the smoking gun, and leaned on it.  His bald head drooped until his gray beard swept his breast, and his throat rattled like a dying man’s.  Shudders went over him.  And stonily young Peter Champneys stood beside him, his boyish eyes hard in a dead-white face, his boyish mouth a grim, pale line.

“Peter,” said the old man presently, in a thin whisper, “I helped raise dat boy.  Wuz n’t sich a bad boy, neither.  Used to sing en wissle roun’ de house, en fetch water en fiah-wood.  Chloe, she loved ’im.  Used to say Ouah Fathuh right in dis same room ‘fo’ he went to sleep.  Ef I ’d ‘a’ knowed—­

“En dat po’ lil w’ite chile’s daddy en mammy, dey done raise ’er—­used to say ‘er prayers—­en laff en sing—­en trus’ de Almighty Gawd—­”

He raised his sinewy arms and shook the gun aloft.

“Ah, Gawd Almighty!  Gawd Almighty!  Whah is You dis night?  Whah is You?” cried the old man.  And of a sudden he began to weep dreadfully; heart-broken cries of pain and of protest, the tortured cries of one suffering inhumanly.

“And all this while God said not a word.”