“After him, you black swine!” he roared at them.  But as they started he checked them.  “Wait!  Get to heel, damn you!”

It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that cursed wood.  There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that close and secret talk he had disturbed.  Pitt might, of course, be reluctant.  So much the worse for Pitt.  The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew a dozen ways — some of them quite diverting — of conquering stubbornness in these convict dogs.

He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with cruel intelligence.  He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.

“Who was that runagate?” he asked with terrible suavity.  Leaning over on his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably on his bare feet.  Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.

The planter’s bamboo cane fell on the lad’s naked shoulders with stinging force.

“Answer me, you dog!  What’s his name?”

Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, for his life’s sake, return.  His body had remained unyielding under it, but the spirit within writhed now in torment.

“You don’t know?  Well, here’s to quicken your wits.”  Again the cane descended.  “Have you thought of his name yet?”

“I have not.”

“Stubborn, eh?” For a moment the Colonel leered.  Then his passion mastered him. “’Swounds!  You impudent dog!  D’you trifle with me?  D’you think I’m to be mocked?”

Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into dogged silence.  Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop’s temper was never one that required much provocation.  Brute fury now awoke in him.  Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders, accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.

But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks.  Muscular bronze arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a leathern thong.

Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment.  Then:  “Fetch him along,” he said.

Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in the Colonel’s wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at work there.  Despair went with him.  What torments might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be.  The real source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution.