ir you next?"--nursing his musket across his knees,
baby-fashion.

Ben measured him with one eye, polished the quid in his greasy hand, and
looked at it.

"Pris'ner o' war," he mumbled, finally,--contemptuously; for Dave's
trousers were in rags like his own, and his chilblained toes stuck
through the shoe-tops. Cheap white trash, clearly.

"Yer master's some at swearin'. Heow many, neow, hes he like you, down
to Georgy?"

The boatman's bony face was gathering a woful pity. He had enlisted to
free the Uncle Toms, and carry God's vengeance to the Legrees. Here they
were, a pair of them.

Ben squinted another critical survey of the "miss'able Linkinite."

"How many wells hev _yer_ poisoned since yer set out?" he muttered.

The sentry stopped.

"How many 'longin' to de Lamars? 'Bout as many as der's dam' Yankees in
Richmond 'baccy-houses!"

Something in Dave's shrewd, whitish eye warned him off.

"Ki yi! yer white nigger, yer!" he chuckled, shuffling down the stubble.

Dave clicked his musket,--then, choking down an oath into a grim
Methodist psalm, resumed his walk, looking askance at the coarse-moulded
face of the prisoner peering through the bars, and the diamond studs in
his shirt,--bought with human blood, doubtless. The man was the black
curse of slavery itself in the flesh, in his thought somehow, and he
hated him accordingly. Our men of the Northwest have enough brawny
Covenanter muscle in their religion to make them good haters for
opinion's sake.

Lamar, the prisoner, watched him with a lazy drollery in his sluggish
black eyes. It died out into sternness, as he looked beyond the sentry.
He had seen this Cheat country before; this very plantation was his
grandfather's a year ago, when he had come up from Georgia here, and
loitered out the summer months with his Virginia cousins, hunting. That
was a pleasant summer! Something in the remembrance of it flashed into
his eyes, dewy, genial; the man's leather-covered face reddened like a
child's. Only a year ago,--and now----The plantation was Charley Dorr's
now, who had married Ruth. This very shed he and Dorr had planned last
spring, and now Charley held him a prisoner in it. The very thought of
Charley Dorr warmed his heart. Why, he could thank God there were such
men. True grit, every inch of his little body! There, last summer, how
he had avoided Ruth until the day when he (Lamar) was going away!--then
he told him he meant to try and win her. "She car