“Oh! what did you do?” I cried, hot with helpless pain and passion.

How the man’s outraged heart sent the blood flaming up into his face and deepened the tones of his impetuous voice, as he stretched his arm across the bed, saying, with a terribly expressive gesture,—­

“I half murdered him, an’ to-night I’ll finish.”

“Yes, yes,—­but go on now; what came next?”

He gave me a look that showed no white man could have felt a deeper degradation in remembering and confining these last acts of brotherly oppression.

“They whipped me till I couldn’t stand, an’ then they sold me further South.  Yer thought I was a white man once;—­look here!”

With a sudden wrench he tore the shirt from neck to waist, and on his strong brown shoulders showed me furrows deeply ploughed, wounds which, though healed, were ghastlier to me than any in that house.  I could not speak to him, and, with the pathetic dignity a great grief lends the humblest sufferer, he ended his brief tragedy by simply saying,—­

“That’s all, Ma’am.  I’ve never seen her since, an’ now I never shall in this world,—­maybe not in t’ other.”

“But, Robert, why think her dead?  The captain was wandering when he said those sad things; perhaps he will retract them when he is sane.  Don’t despair; don’t give up yet.”

“No, Ma’am, I guess he’s right; she was too proud to bear that long.  It’s like her to kill herself.  I told her to, if there was no other way; an’ she always minded me, Lucy did.  My poor girl!  Oh, it warn’t right!  No, by God, it warn’t!”

As the memory of this bitter wrong, this double bereavement, burned in his sore heart, the devil that lurks in every strong man’s blood leaped up; he put his hand upon his brother’s throat, and, watching the white face before him, muttered low between his teeth,—­

“I’m lettin’ him go too easy; there’s no pain in this; we a’n’t even yet.  I wish he knew me.  Marster Ned! it’s Bob; where’s Lucy?”

From the captain’s lips there came a long faint sigh, and nothing but a flutter of the eyelids showed that he still lived.  A strange stillness filled the room as the elder brother held the younger’s life suspended in his hand, while wavering between a dim hope and a deadly hate.  In the whirl of thoughts that went on in my brain, only one was clear enough to act upon.  I must prevent murder, if I could,—­but how?  What could I do up there alone, locked in with a dying man and a lunatic?—­for any mind yielded utterly to any unrighteous impulse is mad while the impulse rules it.  Strength I had not, nor much courage, neither time nor wit for stratagem, and chance only could bring me help before it was too late.  But one weapon I possessed,—­a tongue,—­often a woman’s best defence; and sympathy, stronger than fear, gave me power to use it.  What I said Heaven only knows, but surely Heaven helped me; words burned on my lips, tears streamed from my eyes, and some good angel prompted me to use the one name that had power to arrest my hearer’s hand and touch his heart.  For at that moment I heartily believed that Lucy lived, and this earnest faith rousted in him a like belief.