Shaken to the soul, full of sick horror, and loathing, and rage, Peter Champneys yet had a swift, intuitive understanding of old Neptune; and as if through him he had caught a glimpse of the naked and suffering soul of the black people, the boy began to weep with him.  With understanding merging into pity he crept nearer and put his slender, boyish arm around the big, shaking, agonized figure, and the old man turned his head and looked long and sorrowfully into the white child’s face.  He put out the big, seamed, work-hardened hand that had labored since it could hold an implement to labor with, and laid it on the child’s shoulder.

Then, bareheaded and empty-handed, Neptune sat down on his cabin steps to wait for what should happen, and Peter Champneys sat beside him, the gun between his knees.  Over there by the fowl-house lay Jake, a horrid blotch in the moonlight.

Presently, echoing through the River Swamp, the hunting hounds set up their thrilling, deep-mouthed belling.  They were closing in on their quarry and the nearness of it excited them.  A few minutes later, and here they were, a posse of some thirty or forty mounted men struggling pell-mell after them.  One great hound leaped forward, stood rigid by that which lay in a heap in the cabin clearing, pointed his nose, and gave tongue.  Other dogs bunched around him, sniffed, and joined in.

The mounted men came to an abrupt standstill, the horses, like the dogs, bunching together.  Neptune had risen and Peter Champneys stood on the top step, his head about level with the old man’s shoulder.  He looked in vain for the sheriff; evidently, this was an independent posse.  One of the men rode up to the door, shouting to make himself heard above the din of the dogs, and Peter recognized him, with a sinking of the heart—­a tenant farmer named Mosely, of a violent and quarrelsome disposition.

“Shet up them damn dogs!” he yelled.  And to Neptune, savagely:  “Now then, nigger, talk!  What’s been doin’ here?”

It was Peter Champneys who answered.

“Daddy Neptune’s been worried by something or somebody stealing his fowls.  He’s been on the watch.  So when he saw that—­that nigger over there running by the chicken-house, he just blazed away.  Got him between the shoulder-blades.”

A yell so ferocious that Peter’s marrow froze, burst from the posse, which had dismounted.

“It’s him!” howled a farm-hand, and kicked the corpse in the face.  “What in hell did that big nigger shoot him for, anyhow?” he roared.  “He’d ought to be strung up himself, the old black—­” And he cursed Neptune vilely.  He felt swindled.  There would be no burning, with interludes of unspeakable things.  Nothing but senseless carrion to wreak vengeance upon.  And all through a damned old meddling nigger’s fault!  A nigger taking the law into his own hands!