m with an old elephant gun, and the bullet pierced
his side and he fell on the floor:--because the innocent man suffers
oftentimes for the guilty, and the merciful man falls while the
oppressor flourishes. Then his black servant who was with him took him
quickly in his arms, and carried him out at the back of the hut, and
down into the river bed where the water flowed and no man could trace
his footsteps, and hid him in a hole in the river wall. And when the men
broke into the hut they could find no white man, and no traces of his
feet. But at evening, when the black servant returned to the hut to get
food and medicine for his master, the men who were fighting caught him,
and they said, 'Oh, you betrayer of your people, white man's dog,
who are on the side of those who take our lands and our wives and our
daughters before our eyes; tell us where you have hidden him?' And when
he would not answer them, they killed him before the door of the hut.
And when the night came, the white man crept up on his hands and knees,
and came to his hut to look for food. All the other men were gone, but
his servant lay dead before the door; and the white man knew how it must
have happened. He could not creep further, and he lay down before
the door, and that night the white man and the black lay there dead
together, side by side. Both those men were of my friends."

"It was damned plucky of the nigger," said Peter; "but I've heard of
their doing that sort of thing before. Even of a girl who wouldn't tell
where her mistress was, and getting killed. But," he added doubtfully,
"all your company seem to be niggers or to get killed?"

"They are of all races," said the stranger. "In a city in the old Colony
is one of us, small of stature and small of voice. It came to pass on a
certain Sunday morning, when the men and women were gathered before him,
that he mounted his pulpit: and he said when the time for the sermon
came, 'In place that I should speak to you, I will read you a history.'
And he opened an old book more than two thousand years old: and he read:
'Now it came to pass that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which
was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria.

"'And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may
have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house: and I
will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seemeth good
to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in m