“A few—­you’ve been sending ’em south by the boatload!  You ought to be a rich man, Murrell.  If you’re not it’s your own fault.”

“That furnishes us with money, but you can push the trade too hard and too far, and we’ve about done that.  The planters are uneasy in the sections we’ve worked over, there’s talk of getting together to clean out everybody who can’t give a good account of himself.  The Clan’s got to deal a counter blow or go out of business.  It was so with the horse trade; in the end it became mighty unhandy to move the stock we’d collected.  We’ve reached the same point now with the trade in niggers.  Between here and the gulf—­” he made a wide sweeping gesture with his arm.  “I am spotting the country with my men; there are two thousand active workers on the rolls of the Clan, and as many more like you, Tom —­and Fentress—­on whose friendship I can rely.”  He leaned toward Ware.  “You’d be slow to tell me I couldn’t count on you, Tom, and you’d be slow to think I couldn’t manage this thing when the time’s ripe for it!”

But no trace of this all-sufficient sense of confidence, of which he seemed so certain, showed on Ware’s hardened visage.  He spat away the stump of his cigar.

“Sure as God, John Murrell, you are overreaching yourself!  Your white men are all right, they’ve got to stick by you; if they don’t they know it’s only a question of time until they get a knife driven into their ribs—­but niggers—­there isn’t any real fight in a nigger, if there was they wouldn’t be here.”

“Yet you couldn’t have made the whites in Hayti believe that,” said Murrell, with a sinister smile.

“Because they were no-account trash themselves!” returned Ware, shaking his head.  “We’ll all go down in this muss you’re fixing for!” he added.

“No, you won’t, Tom.  I’ll look out for my friends.  You’ll be warned in time.”

“A hell of a lot of good a warning will do!” growled Ware.

“The business will be engineered so that you, and those like you, will not be disturbed.  Maybe the niggers will have control of the country for a day or two in the thickly settled parts near the towns; longer, of course, where the towns and plantations are scattering.  The end will come in the swamps and cane-brakes, and the members of the Clan who don’t get rich while the trouble is at its worst, will have to stay poor.  As for the niggers, I expect nothing else than that they will be pretty well exterminated.  But look what that will do for men like yourself, Tom, who will have been able to hold on to their slaves!”

“I’d like to have some guarantee that I’d be able to; do that!  No, sir, the devils will all go whooping off to raise hell.”  Ware shivered at the picture his mind had conjured up.  “Well, thank God, they’re not my niggers!” he added.

“You’d better come with me, Tom,” said Murrell.

“With you?”