“Fust rate, Mas’r.”

“Quimbo,” said Legree to another, who was making zealous demonstrations to attract his attention, “ye minded what I telled ye?”

“Guess I did, didn’t I?”

These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation.  Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty, brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities.  It is a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against the character of the race, that the negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one.  This is simply saying that the negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white.  It is no more true of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over.  The slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.

Legree, like some potentates we read of in history, governed his plantation by a sort of resolution of forces.  Sambo and Quimbo cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all, cordially hated them; and, by playing off one against another, he was pretty sure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get informed of whatever was on foot in the place.

Nobody can live entirely without social intercourse; and Legree encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse familiarity with him,—­a familiarity, however, at any moment liable to get one or the other of them into trouble; for, on the slightest provocation, one of them always stood ready, at a nod, to be a minister of his vengeance on the other.

As they stood there now by Legree, they seemed an apt illustration of the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals.  Their coarse, dark, heavy features; their great eyes, rolling enviously on each other; their barbarous, guttural, half-brute intonation; their dilapidated garments fluttering in the wind,—­were all in admirable keeping with the vile and unwholesome character of everything about the place.

“Here, you Sambo,” said Legree, “take these yer boys down to the quarters; and here’s a gal I’ve got for you,” said he, as he separated the mulatto woman from Emmeline, and pushed her towards him;—­“I promised to bring you one, you know.”

The woman gave a start, and drawing back, said, suddenly,

“O, Mas’r!  I left my old man in New Orleans.”

“What of that, you—­; won’t you want one here?  None o’ your words,—­go long!” said Legree, raising his whip.

“Come, mistress,” he said to Emmeline, “you go in here with me.”

A dark, wild face was seen, for a moment, to glance at the window of the house; and, as Legree opened the door, a female voice said something, in a quick, imperative tone.  Tom, who was looking, with anxious interest, after Emmeline, as she went in, noticed this, and heard Legree answer, angrily, “You may hold your tongue!  I’ll do as I please, for all you!”