Chapter III: Prologue: I (2)

He stood for an instant, panting, with a wild exultation pouring like fire through his veins. Then snatching the heavy bowie-knife from the floor, he sprang from the room, and leaped on the veranda just as the overseer, who had come up again from the fields, had set one foot on the steps to ascend. Flying against him full shock, he threw him backward clear and clean off his feet, and saw his head bounce with a terrific concussion on the grass as he sped on over the stunned body. He did not pause, nor look behind, but flew with the rush of a race-horse for the swamp. The light wind had risen, and the grain in the fields and the scattered trees on either side, and in the skirting woods beyond, and all the lurking shadows, waved, and tossed, and lifted under the sultry vault, as he sped his desperate course, while the hot landscape rushed to meet him, and ran whirling by, closing around and behind him, and seeming to follow as he flew. Across the lawn, its grass and wildflowers sliding dizzily beneath him—up with a flying leap across the fence, which vanished below him—and down with a light shock on the red plantation marl which rose to meet him, and reeled from under him as he bounded on. Away, with frantic speed, over rows of cotton-plants, bruised beneath his feet, and gliding from under him—away, with a wilder leap, as the loud shouts of the slaves in full chorus struck his ear, and he saw them all, men and women, with open mouths and upthrown arms, stand with the mules and ploughs in the field on one side, and vanish from his flying glimpse as he fled by. Away, with every nerve and sinew desperately strung—with his pained heart knocking against his side—with his held breath bursting from him in short gasps—with the sweat reeking and pouring down his body, and dropping in big drops from his face, to be caught upon his clothes in his speed—with the bright knife, as his last refuge, clutched in his grasp—with the one thought of Liberty or Death burning in the whirl of his brain. Past the plantation now, his feet thudding heavily on a hard, black soil—on, with the swarming hum of innumerable insects, murmurously swirling by—on, with the light and rapid current of the hot south wind cool on the pain and fervor of his face, and swiftly purring in his ears—on, over rushing grass and flowers, and stunted shrubs and butts of trees—up again with a furious leap over a fence that sinks, and down again with a heavy thump on ground that rises—on and away at headlong speed over a field of monstrous stumps, scattering the light chips as he flies—in now with a bound among the bright-green leaves of a thick palmetto bottom, and on with a rush through the swish, swish, swish of their loud and angry rustle, as he crashes forward to the still gleam of the bayou. Now his feet swash heavily on a grassy turf that yields like sponge, and water fills his shoes at every bound. Now the water deepens, and he sinks above his ankles or midway to his knees, as he splashes forward with headlong velocity, half-conscious and wholly careless in his desperate exultation that black venomous water-snakes writhe up behind him as he plunges through their pools. Now he bounds over a bank of black mire, and swerves in his course as something like a dirty log changes to an alligator, and lumbers swiftly toward him with yawning jaws. And now splashing through the green slime of the margin, he bursts with a plunge into the glistening waters of the bayou, and swims with vigorous strokes, while the gaunt bittern on the bank beyond scrambles away with squawking screams. Swimming till the water shoals, he flounders on again through slime to mire, and over another bog of pools and water-plants and spongy sod, till gaining the outskirts of the dense forest, and reaching a patch of damp, black earth under an enormous cypress-tree, he slackens his pace, stops suddenly, and throwing up his arms upon the trunk, drops his head upon them, panting and blowing—and the first mile-heat of the dreadful race for Liberty or Death is run!

III.

For a few minutes, exhausted with the terrible speed he had maintained, Antony leaned upon his arms with closed eyes, his breath suffocating him, his heart painfully throbbing, his limbs aching and trembling, and the water dripping from his clothes and trickling away on the black soil in small streams. The trees whispered over him as he panted beneath them, and their mysterious murmurs were the only sounds, save his own stertorous breathings, that were heard in the dead stillness. Recovering his breath in a few minutes, he lifted his head and turned around, letting his pained arms fall heavily by his side. He was no longer oppressed with heat, for the plunge in the bayou had cooled him; but his whole body ached not only with the exertions of the last few minutes, but from the previous torture of the bucking, and already his strength, heavily taxed by his long abstinence from food (for it was now more than fifteen hours since he had eaten), and only sustained by the intense excitement he had undergone, began to flag. His brain reeled and whirled still, and his apprehension was confused and dull. Gradually he began to be more sensible of the sore and swollen condition of his wrists and ankles, of the smart of the wounds in his forehead, and the stinging of the fragments of glass in his face. There was one sore spot in his chest just beneath his shoulder, which for a few moments he was at a loss to account for, till he suddenly remembered that his tyrant’s foot had struck him there when he had kicked him over upon the floor. At the same instant he felt the chafe of the iron collar on his neck, and raising his hand suddenly, it struck against the blunt point of the prong. Gnashing his teeth with rage as the scene in that room rose in his mind, he seized the collar with both hands, and with a fierce imprecation, strove to rend it asunder. But the lock remained firm, and convulsed with a bitter sense of humiliation, as he thought of that accursed badge of his servitude inexorably riveted to his neck, the miserable man burst into tears.

It was but a brief spasm, and summoning up new courage to his failing heart as he remembered that his dreadful journey lay still before him, he cast his eyes around into the swamp. Softened by the foliage of the wilderness of gigantic trees, and duskily lighting the long streamers of melancholy moss which greyed their green, the sultry sunlight, slanting athwart the enormous trunks, and tinting with sullen brilliance the scarlet, blue and yellow blossoms of parasitical plants which sprinkled the boles and branches in thick-millioned profusion, glistered on the muddy shallows of the morass, whose dismal level, broken here and there by masses of shadow, and huge bulks of fallen timber, stretched far away, like some abominable tarn of slush and suds, into vistas of horrid gloom. Here and there, stranded on shoals of mire, or basking on pieces of floodwood, alligators, great and small, sunned their barky hides; while from every shallow pool, or wriggling around drifting logs or trunks of fallen trees, the venomous moccasin-snakes, whose bite is certain death, lifted their black devilish heads by scores, and made the loathsome marsh more loathsome with their presence. Over the frightful quagmire brooded an oppressive stillness, broken only by the mournful and evil whispering of the trees, or by the faint wriggling plash of the water-serpents. Thick, sickly odors of plants and flowers, blent with the stench of the morass, burdened the stagnant air, through whose languid warmth chill breaths crept from the dank and dense arcades of the forest. Vast, malignant, desolate and monstrous, loomed in the eyes of the wretched fugitive, the awful road to Liberty or Death.

His soul shrank from treading it. The fire had faded from his heart, and in that moment death by his own hand, for he would not be captured, seemed preferable to the terrors of the fen. Faint, weak, famished, weary unto agony, his whole body one breathing ache, his spirit all unnerved with the sense of his past and present misery, and nothing but despair before him, how could he hope to go on and live. Yet he could not remain here. Soon the hounds would be on his track—they would cross the bayou he had swam, and strike his trail. He must plunge still further into the swamp to distance them, or he must die here by the knife in his hand.

He turned and looked over the bayou far up the lowland to the plantation a mile away. Suddenly he started, clutching the knife with a firm grasp, his eyes flashing, his teeth and nostrils set, and his manhood once again flooding his heart with fire. Figures near the mansion—figures on horseback, guns, flashing in the sun, in their hands—one, two, three, four, five, six—six mounted horsemen—and, lower down on the lawn, what are those things running in circles? Hark! Far off a long, harsh, savage, yelling bay. The hunt is afoot, and the hounds have struck the trail! Away, Antony, for Liberty or Death!

Eyes flashing, teeth and nostrils set, every nerve and sinew valorously strung, he turned with a leap, and rushed straight into the morass. Before the headlong, desperate courage of his charge, the loathsome tenants of the swamp gave way. Plunging from the floodwood, the affrighted alligator trundled off, and the startled moccasins slipped and writhed from his path at the noise of his coming. Hark, again! Nearer than before the booming yell of the hounds. Speed, Antony! It is the Sabbath of the Lord our God, and we hunt you down. What man shall there be among us that shall have one slave, and if it fly into the morass on the Sabbath day, shall he not set hounds upon it and hunt it down? Speed on, dark chattel! The good Christians of St. Landry and Avoyelles are spurring hard upon your trail, and in the land over which the memory of Christ stretches like the sky, well-doing such as theirs is lawful on the Sabbath as on every other day!

Splashing and swashing on over the slushy surface of the quagmire, now sinking no deeper than the soles of his shoes, now plashing up to his shins, now to his knees, now nearly to his thighs, now bounding upon logs and fallen trunks, or rushing over masses of brushwood and briers, which switched and stung his ankles, he could still hear, at brief intervals, the savage yowling of the hounds. As yet there was no safety, for the dogs could still scent his trail, here and there, on the shoals of mire or clumps of bog over which he had passed. His hope was in reaching deeper water, or arriving at some broad bayou which would effectually impede their course. Goaded by his imminent peril, for he soon heard the long yells much nearer, and knew that the cruel brutes were rapidly gaining on him—he floundered frantically on, his heart leaping in his throat at every howl, and the sweat gathering in cold drops on his face. Soon, to his great joy, the foul lagoons began to deepen, the water reaching more uniformly above his knees, and at length he came upon a space through which he floundered for more than half an hour, sinking to his thighs at every plunge, and knew by the confused and lessening clamor of the dogs, that he was leaving them. He did not slacken his pace, though the depth of the water made it still more difficult to travel, till at last he entered a horrid grove of gloom, where the pyramidal clumps from which shot up the straight, dark pillars of the cypresses, were submerged in the inky flood, and sinking above his hips, he was forced to move more slowly. Fiercely plunging on through the cold black tarn, over a soft bottom of leaves and moss, which sank loathsomely beneath his tread, like a subfluvial field of sponge, he heard again the harsh yells of the dogs, and they now seemed nearer than before. He strove, but vainly, to move on faster, and his fancy ran riot as he thought of the hounds slopping on through the fen, and coming into sight of him. Already, in his delirious fancy, he heard the wild and savage yowls of that moment, and the exulting halloos of his pursuers. The dogs would leap into the shallow ponds—they would swim faster than he could wade—he would hear their savage panting close behind him—he would turn and feel them flop upon him, and their sharp teeth crush into his flesh—he would strike them with his bowie-knife—he would see the black water redden with their blood—they would overbear him and drag him down with yelling, and howling, and frantic splashing and struggling, while the shouting planters would come riding through the swamp and seize him. Lashed into frenzy by the anticipated drama, he brandished the knife, with a hoarse cry, and staggering forward, suddenly sank to his arm-pits. An instant of alarm, succeeded by wild joy, for the water had deepened, and striking out, he swam. Clogged by his heavy shoes, now filled with mud, and soaked to an added weight with water, it was hard swimming; but his fear and fury gave him superhuman energy, and nerved with unnatural vigor his weakened thews. He swam for a long time, with the solemn night of the dense cypress dusking his form and shadowing the tarn. At length the dreadful twilight of the grove began to lighten, and far beyond he saw the sunlight illuminating the grey and green of the trees, and the many colored parasites and flowers, and shining on the mud and water of the marsh. Presently he struck bottom, and wading again for a long distance, emerged at length into the sunlight, among the shallows and mud-shoals, and rushed on as before, till at last, as the sun was near its setting, he stood on the banks of an unknown river, which, whispering sullenly past its margin of sedge and water-flowers, moved, with an imperceptible motion, through the solemn and horrible wilderness of forest.

He stood gazing across it with a haggard and mournful countenance. The croak of frogs came faintly from its border, and mingled with the distant quacking of crowds of mallard ducks from the opposite shore, the vague hooting of owls in the swamp beyond, and the occasional plunge of an alligator from the adjacent margin. Dreary and ominous sounds, which yet hardly disturbed the stagnant stillness around him. The wind had lulled, and no whisper came from the bearded trees, which stood like boding shapes on every side. Hope was faint in the heart of the fugitive. Relieved from the engrossment of the immediate peril, his spirit began to come under the sole dominion of the brooding horrors around him, and as he vainly pondered on the dark problem of his deliverance, Death seemed ever gathering slowly toward him, and Liberty lessening in ever-growing distance.

Liberty or Death. The historic phrase came to him again like a voice that urged him forward. He paused only a little longer, to tear a strip from his coarse shirt and tie the bowie-knife at the back of his neck to the iron collar. Then tearing another strip, he pulled off his heavy brogans, shook the mud out of them, and passing the strip through the eyelets, he also secured them to the collar, one on each shoulder. So accoutred, he braced himself anew for effort, and taking up a slender sapling from the ground to beat the pools between him and the bayou—for he now feared the moccasins—in a few moments he was in the water, steadily swimming forward, with the sapling held in his teeth.

Gaining the opposite bank, he stopped on a patch of black mire, to put on his shoes, and then went forward, beating the path before him. Dreadful apprehensions of the beasts and reptiles which inhabited the swamp, now crowded on his mind, while to add to his distress, the sunlight in the forest spaces was stealing rapidly upward from the foliage of the loftiest trees. Quickening his pace, he staggered on through the haunted dusk of the tree-trunks, with the hooting of the swamp owls, the quacking of innumerable ducks, the bellowing and plunging of alligators, the screeching and screaming of strange, semi-tropic birds, the howling of distant beasts, and the multitudinous croak of frogs, sounding on every side around him.

He broke into a heavy run, came at length to a thinner part of the forest, and presently emerged upon a vast open space of quagmire, stretching two or three miles away, with scattered trees standing and leaning in all directions in its broad expanse. Here he paused.

The sun had sunk behind the distant forest, tinging the misty sky far up the zenith with lowering red, and suddenly, as by some fell enchantment, the swamp had become a sullen slough of blood. Shadows of inky blackness stretched athwart the red expanse, and the distorted trees that crossed and intercrossed each other here and there, were giant eldritch shapes of unimaginable things. Lank and hairy—all askew and bristling—clothed as with fearful rags—with monstrous heads ahunch in unnatural places, and shaggy jags of drooping beards, and dusky arms grotesquely forked and twisted, and huge lengths of gaunt body that abruptly splayed and sprawled in malformed feet—they loomed from the fen of murky gore against the angry color of the sky, like some black congress of ambiguous mongrel wizards whose spell was on the scene. All around beneath them, protruding from the red lagoons, huge butts of logs, gnarled stumps, and black knees of cypress, squatted and crouched like water-fiends. Through the dusky air, laden with the damp smell of the swamp, frightful brown bats whirled clacking to and fro in the red light like lesser demons on the wing. From every side came hootings and croakings, screechings and wailings, howlings and bellowings and sullen plunges, like the riotous clamor of devils at some tremendous incantation. A sense of supernatural horror pervaded all, and weighed upon the appalled heart of the trembling fugitive.

He hesitated a few moments whether to cross this dreary expanse, or strike off into the denser forest, but decided to go forward. Whipping a pool before him which did not move, he was just setting his foot in it, when the venomous face of a moccasin rose at him with a dark slapping flash. He sprang back simultaneously, and saw the monster vanish, feeling at the same time a sharp pang just above his ankle. He was bitten! All was over!

Stooping slowly, with a wild terror shuddering through his veins, he looked at the wounded limb. But no, there was no bite. The snake had missed him. In his backward leap, he had struck his leg against the upturned spike of a broken branch which lay behind him. The revulsion in his spirit at this discovery was so great that he broke into a quaver of hysterical laughter, which echoed dismally through the swamp, and woke such an answering chorus of demoniacal hooting and screeching in the adjacent boughs, that he was affrighted, and turning away from the open space, he was about to rush into the forest on his flank, when he saw with a leap of heart, two round glistening balls in the dark foliage of a tree a few yards before him, and something long and dark crouching along the bough. It was a panther! He wheeled at once with a bound, and fled headlong into the red morass.

Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged along through the inky water, quivering at every step lest he should feel the sting of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe of the alligator. It was a long journey across the open fen. The red light had faded from sky and water, and the full moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens when he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous orb of silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached the solid sable gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness.

An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey across the open fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange man, with a single dog, had followed him, at a considerable distance the whole way. A strange man, silent, with a silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without coming, or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that this was so, though he did not dare to turn his head to see if it was so. He knew too just how the man looked—a dark figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also dark, by his side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!

The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees again. Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here and there by an uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight, or the blue flicker of a dancing and vanishing fen-light, he found the water still ankle or knee deep, and the walking difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees and stumps and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all about him, and in the branches overhead, there were such plungings and crashings, and such a clamor of flutterings and hootings and screechings, that his blood ran cold. He held his course, however, hoping to come upon some dry spot in the great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do to escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for his body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was drenched from head to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking, he shivered with cold. His vitals were weak and aching for want of food; his head was light with sleeplessness; and insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and horror-laden mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to iron, and that he would soon be unable to raise them for their weight, and would be obliged to stand there in the quagmire. Then in the glimmering darkness the moccasins would rise from the pools and surround him in a circle. They would gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of devilish serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in the branches all the panthers would gather, savagely grinning at him, and every one would have the visage of Lafitte. Then all at once the writhing wall of snakes would sway forward, and strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and strike again with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers would look on with the face of his master, and laugh softly with the smooth voice of his master. And the writhing wall would dilate and expand till every snake was vaster than an anaconda, and the mass together would fall away at every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the sky, and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would rise and resound through space, and the panthers and the tigers would dilate with the rest, and look on with enormous faces like his master’s, and their smooth laughter would grow louder and louder into smooth thunders of laughter, and the bristling and the striking and the swelling and the shrieking and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and forever.

“Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”

The words burst from him suddenly, as he felt the horrible fancy rush upon him with dreadful reality, and almost master him. All aghast with a new terror at the foreign and incongruous effect of his own tones in that haunted darkness, and amidst the unhuman voices around him, he was utterly appalled and confounded the next instant at the frightful clamor which rose with a simultaneous outburst, volleying tumultuously around him on every side like the multitudinous rush and uproar of devils when the silence of the magic circle has been broken and the enchanter is to be torn to pieces. Whooping, hooting, screaming, wailing, yelling, whirring, flapping, cackling, howling, bellowing and roaring—all rose together in a long continued and reverberating whirl and brawl, filling the darkness with a deafening din. Staggering madly forward, the terrified fugitive broke into a blind and frantic run, feeling as in a horrible dream, that the pools had changed to ground which was sloping rapidly up to strike him in the face and stop him; till at last with a sudden lightening of the darkness, something caught his feet and threw him headlong, and with an awful sense that he was seized, and with the hideous tintamar swirling downward like the gurgling roar of water in the ears of a drowning man, he swooned away.

IV.

Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life revived. How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew not. He felt that he was lying on bare, damp ground, and that the moonlight was around him. The din had sunk into confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing distantly through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror, mixed with consciousness of all he had passed through, and of the place he was in, began to invade the silent vacancy, and crept upon him as from afar. Shuddering slightly, with icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood, he slowly raised himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a vague relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed with giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight and sable shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage of a ground-vine, in which his foot was still entangled. Disengaging the limb without rising from his knees, he continued to gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense of awe, as he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of the forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas, diminishing in interminable perspective, the ground stretched in vast mosaics of sable and silver, bunched and ridged with low flowers and herbage and running vines, all moveless and colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight, and in the solemn shadow, as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the enormous clustered columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like a massive shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses of gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen glory, spread aloft and interwove like the groined concave of some tremendous gothic roof, while from the leaf-embossed and splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses drooped heavily, like black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles. The air was dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors from the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered with crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered bluely down the arcades in the morass; and all around from the bordering quagmire, and from the crypts and vaults of the shadows, the demon-voices of the region, sounding from above and below, and rapidly swelling into full choir, chanted in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly pomp, the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark imagination might have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration of the monstrous crime against mankind which centered in this region, was pealing through the vaulted aisles and arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy of human souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his wide and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs of slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer, while their own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual comforts thrive around them. Peopling the vast and drear nocturnal solitudes, under the moonlit arches, here they might come, while the screaming, hooting, bellowing chant resounded, and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse of base powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great object of government to be the protection of property in man, and wield the mighty engine of the state for the oppression of the weak; placemen who suck on office, deaf and blind to the interests of the poor; scurvy politicians, intent on pelf and power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate away the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural law, who decree that black men have no rights that white men are bound to respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of the learned and the brave, who prate with learned ignorance of manifest destiny and inferior races, to justify against all human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor; hide-bound priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors, or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save the Union; traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening with never-sated avarice, and furious against liberty and justice as lesseners of their gains; these, and their rabblement of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and kidnappers, and men-hunters, and slave-law commissioners—here they might assemble to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might prosper, and love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness, and man degrade into the brute and fiend. Fit place and time, and fit surroundings for such rites as these; fitter far than for the trembling murmurs of a solitary slave, kneeling in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the forlorn agony of his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.

Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the cathedrals he had seen many years before when he was a slave in New Orleans; some dim sense that he was on his knees in the attitude of supplication, had mixed with the overwhelming consciousness of his helplessness, his wretchedness, and his danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently, in uncouth words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed with perils, and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac clamor of the forest rose louder and louder as he went on, breaking his communion with God, till at length, appalled by the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his feet, uncomforted and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.

He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly gone that he tottered. His setting forward again was a mere mechanical action, but it continued for some minutes before the dull thought came to him that his movement was useless. In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to climb a tree, where, lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he would be safer and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his strength was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages of exhaustion.

Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till morning, when there would be less danger of wild beasts, and he might dare to repose. He sat for a long time shuddering with cold, and watching intently all about him, lest some panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or twice, with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at length, affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping off into slumber, he strove to occupy his mind by observing minutely the various details of the scene before him. He had been busy at this for some time, when he became suddenly and quietly perplexed with the feeling that there was something he ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or define what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the hole of a gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf palmettoes, slightly silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and from time to time he saw, without receiving any impression therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the palmetto leaves. Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought to have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he strove to shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What could it be? As suddenly and quietly as before it came to him, and at the same moment his eye took in the meaning of that curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was the smell of smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now, and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little strength returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at the misty ringlets lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly was smoke; he smelled now very distinctly the dry scent of burning wood. Who could have a fire in the heart of the swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious fancies rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession, he resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go forward and solve the mystery; and taking the knife from the back of his neck, he cautiously approached the palmettoes, his blood thrilling, and his heart beating, and all the forest resonant around him. Peering through the leaves, he saw with amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A sort of fright fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering instantly, he again advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke in a voice faint both from weakness and trepidation:

“Ho, there! Ho, you in there! You there, whoever you are!”

There was no answer, nor movement, but at the sound of his voice, a tremendous uproar burst forth again in the forest. Desperate at this, he again spoke in a louder tone:

“Ho, now, you in there! You just say who you are. I’m coming in now!”

No answer, but the uproar in the branches and from the swamp increased like a tempest. Strung up now to his highest pitch, Antony clutched his knife, and setting his teeth hard, plunged in through the hole.

It was densely dark within. The immense cypress was completely hollow, as he could feel, for stretching out his arms he encountered nothing. He began to grope about, but stopped suddenly, thinking it better to get a light. Quite overcome by the strangeness of his discovery, and by the novel circumstance of a fire being found smouldering before an empty tree, he stooped down through the low entrance to the brands, and blowing upon one till it flamed, withdrew himself again into the tree, and looked around. Suddenly, with a hoarse gasp of horror, he tottered back, falling from his squatting posture over upon the ground, and dropping the brand, which at once went out, leaving him in utter darkness. In that instant he had caught a glimpse, by the fitful flame, of a lank figure, duskily clothed, lying on its back, with a mop of thick white hair, a leathern face hideously grinning, and glassy eyes which had met his; and he felt like one who had entered the lair of a fiend.

So paralyzed was he with affright, that instead of scrambling out of the tree, he sat motionless, leaning back on his hands, with his blood curdling, and cold thrills crawling under his hair. A wild fancy that he would be instantly sprung upon by this thing, held him still and breathless. But all remained silent and moveless, and at last, venturing to stir, he got up on one knee, and pressed his hands on his heart to stop its mad beating. By degrees his courage came back to him, or, at least, his dreadful fear became blended with desperation. Then came wild wonder at the horrible strangeness of that figure, and slowly this melted into a savage and frenzied curiosity. Seizing the smoking brand from the earth, he backed out through the hole (for he absolutely did not dare to turn his back to the dread tenant of the cavern), and, once outside, blew upon the stick till it reflamed. Waiting a moment till the light burned strongly, he thrust it through the hole, and holding it above his head, glared with starting eyes upon the face of the figure.

He saw in a moment that it was nothing unearthly—only the form of an aged woman, and of his own race. Instantly it struck him that she was a fugitive, probably a dweller in the swamp. Reëntering the tree, he approached and held the blazing brand over her countenance. With a terrible sensation of awe he saw that it was the countenance of the dead. She lay on a couch of the forest moss, her gaunt figure decently composed, with the hands crossed, as if she had known that she was dying. She was apparently very old; the woolly hair was white; the black face was deeply wrinkled, and much emaciated; the mouth was open, and had fallen back, showing the white teeth, which were perfectly sound as in her youth; and the glassy eyes were unclosed and fixed aslant with that look which had so terrified the fugitive. He felt no terror now, however, only awe; for with the discovery of the truth, the hideousness of the face was gone. Bending down, he touched the cheek. It was still tepid—almost warm; the life had not been long extinct, a fact of which the smouldering brands of the fire she had kindled was another evidence. Poring upon the features, a confused feeling gathered in his mind that he had seen them before, and he strove to resolve it into certainty. Suddenly, as the flickering of the burning brand he held brought out a new expression on the dark, withered lineaments, it flashed upon him that this was old Nancy. She had been a slave on Mellott’s plantation, near Lafitte’s, and had disappeared five or six years before, after a terrible whipping. They had hunted the swamp for her without avail, and it was supposed that she had perished. Here she had lived, however, and here she was now, all her earthly troubles over.

Turning away from the body in wild wonderment, the fugitive looked around him. The space within the tree must have been at least six feet in diameter. It had been hollowed out by time in the form of an upright cone, the apex of which was at least a dozen feet above the ground. The hole had probably been eaten out by a sort of dry rot, or perhaps by insects, for the wooden walls were not damp, nor was the corrugated floor. The only furniture was the couch of Spanish moss on which the body lay, a block of wood fashioned for a seat out of the butt end of a log, and a long paddle, bladed at both ends, which leaned upright against the wall. Looking around further, Antony noticed some little niches cut in the walls, with the handle of a hatchet sticking out of one of them. On the blade was a parcel wrapped in cotton cloth, in which he found three or four corn-cob pipes, a bundle of dried tobacco-leaf, bunches of matches, and two or three knick-knacks of no great use. Evidently Nancy had made occasional excursions from her hiding-place, for these things must all have been borrowed from the race of the taskmasters. This was still more evident as Antony pursued his observations. In another niche, he found at least half a peck of corn done up in a cloth, and in a wooden quart measure there was some more, parched. His hunger rose so suddenly and fiercely at sight of the food that he at once crammed a handful of the parched corn into his mouth, and with the measure in his hand, continued to crunch, although his throat was so swollen with his long fast that he could scarcely swallow. Continuing his search while he ate, he found in a third niche an oblong tin pan and a gourd, but in the pan, to his astonishment and delight, there was a dead opossum and a small fish. They were both fresh—Nancy must have captured them that very day. She had lived a woodman’s life in the heart of the morass, setting her fishtraps on the bayou, and catching the smaller animals in the forest. Forgetting to pursue his search further in the desire to appease his ravening hunger, Antony only paused to lay one of the pieces of cotton cloth over the face of the dead, and then set to work to rake the fire into a bed of coals, and hastily dressing the meat with his bowie-knife, broiled it, and ate with the eager voracity of a man half starved.

A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of all enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from himself, was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the embers, in the dusky glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked food, tasting of smoke and cinders, as to some wild wolf that gnawed his vitals. In the darkness behind him lay the swart corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror in his mind. Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a dull, stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the swollen pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of the sleeplessness in his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his wet clothes, the filthy smell of the muck and slime that covered him, and all was mixed confusedly with a dimmer apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear forest.

His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all his sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The fierce gnawing at his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention, as if something huge and bloated lay dead within him. His horror of the corpse had grown stronger even than the heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit, and he now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to be buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk from the labor of making it a grave.

Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest.

The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.

V.

He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept a minute, but at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting eyes through the brown dusk of the hollow, he was confused at seeing the palmetto leaves at the entrance plainly visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that it was broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly, a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and made him gasp with pain. He remained for a minute supporting himself on his hands, and then slowly and painfully arose. Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even worse off in body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were much swollen where the ropes of the bucking had cut them. He felt as if he had been switched all over with nettles, from the stings and scratches of the thorns and briers through which he had travelled. His face pained him especially, the atoms of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its wounds and bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at that moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar. His flesh was raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost the first thing he did was to tie one of the pieces of cotton cloth around his neck for the edge of the iron to rest on. Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and fro, gasping and panting at every step with pain.

After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier, and stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him that Nancy must have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles he had found in the hollow confirmed his belief. To get away from the swamp was his fixed purpose, and in that land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat, he might avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.

Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the question was, where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree to commence a search for it, he saw it right at the base of the trunk under the palmettoes. But Nancy’s periagua was a canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of slender wattles. Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some visiting tribe from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the boats Antony had ever seen among them were periaguas. At all events here it was, and elated with its discovery, the fugitive instantly brought forth the paddle, the hatchet, the bowie-knife, the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and placed them in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton cloth hanging out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it came—an old blue cotton gown. Turning over the moss, he uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an old pair of grey trowsers, a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and one stocking. Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him with a change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers into the canoe, and lifting the latter, plunged out through the palmettoes into the forest.

A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight that it was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had he been in the enforced habits of plantation life to rise at daybreak, that on waking in the hollow he naturally thought he had awakened at the usual morning hour. He shuddered now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost, when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting, might be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte would, in his burning lust for vengeance, hunt the swamp for weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and he must at once speed away.

He stood for a moment debating which direction to take, when looking down he happened to see a spot where the earth had been harrowed by the claws of some wild beast, and upon the scratches was the distinct imprint of a naked foot. It came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue a track, in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping along painfully with the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously, for by the sudden slipping and rustling in the grass and herbage he knew that snakes were around him, suddenly his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole frame. He had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay in a faint glimmer of sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth. The sluggish reptile quivered slightly throughout its mottled length, and lifting its head with venom in its sparkling eyes and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and swiftly slid from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that he was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite of himself at every buzzard that flew from his path, or small animal that crossed it, and feeling that everything was watching him, and that the multitudinous chatter of the birds that filled the forest was concerning him, he went on his way. Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from his path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou. A fallen tree lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half way across; a rotten log floated in the water; stumps and snags projected here and there; waifs of moss, slivers of branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of forest debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the shadows.

Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself with the old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers. Then laying the canoe on the water, where it lightly danced, he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle in the middle, and plying the blades first on one side and then on the other, shot slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.

Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to left, and darted with an uncertain forward motion, trembling beneath him like a living thing that shared his agitation. Black banks of mud, pierced here and there with alligator holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps and masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees and trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy pride, and the vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness of massive trunks uplifting their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden branches, spread and loomed in solemn and splendid confusion on either side as the boat lightly darted on its sinuous course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the margin as it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from the banks squawking and screaming; strange birds of gorgeous plumage flew rustling through the branches; scarlet-gilled black buzzards rose and soared with broad and steady wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped and swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward, now on one side, now on the other, on sped the brown canoe, while the shadows grew inkier on the sombre water, and again under the red reflection of the sky, the dull bayou became a stream of blood.