Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the
two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It
was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations
since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him
a couple of years ago.
"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.
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