saddle for one of my hired span. "You must excuse us if
we're not polite," my friends apologized after another flash of
impatience. "Of course those niggers are not on the run in broad day,
but their trail's getting cold!"

"You're not as bad-mannered as I am," I laughed as we mounted, but
their allusion to hounds made me enjoy the burden of my six-shooter.

As we ambled off, "What were you going to say," one asked me, "about
our 'theory,' or something?"

"Oh! I see you think Mrs. Southmayd must have met up with company and
left her servants to follow on to the next station alone."

"Exactly. We tracked the darkies along the edge of the road; but her
horse tracks--we could only see that no horse tracks left the road
where any of their man tracks left it."

When we had gone a mile or so one of the boys turned to leave us by a
neighborhood road, saying: "I'll rejoin you, 'cross fields, where you
turned back last night. I'm going for the dogs."

"Stop! Gentlemen, this is too high-handed. Do you reckon I'll let you
run down those four innocent creatures with hounds? I _swear_ you
shan't do it, sirs."

"See here," said the one still with me, "come on. We'll show you the
very spots where those innocents left the road one by one, and if you
don't say they've used every trick known to a nigger to kill their
trail, we'll just quit and go home. Does that suit you?"

"Not by a long chalk!" I retorted as I moved with him up the pike.
"Those poor simpletons--alone in a strange land, maybe without a pass,
at any moment liable to meet a patrol--how easy for them to make the
fatal mistake of leaving the road and hiding their tracks!"

"All right, come ahead, you'll see fair play."

We passed the scene of the breakdown and then the house to which the
coach had been drawn. I saw the coach in a stable door. By and by a
turn in the pike revealed the other clerk and a tall, slim horseman
just dismounting among four lop-eared, black-and-brown dogs coupled two
and two by light steel breast-yokes. With a heavy whip and without a
frown this man gave one of them a quick cut over the face as the brute
ventured to lift a voice as hollow and melodious as a bell.

"He's a puppy I'm breaking in," said the man. "Now here, you see"--he
pointed to the middle of the road--"is where you, sir, met up with the
madam and her niggers, and given her yo' hoss and taken her span.
Here's the tracks o' the span, you takin' 'em back; you c