hich the wretch had just uttered. He turned
aside into the edge of the woods, and there beheld an object to excite
at once his laughter and compassion. What he saw was this.

Dan Pepperill, astride a rail; his hands tied together above it, and his
feet similarly bound beneath. The rail had been taken from a fence a
mile away, and he had been carried all that distance on the shoulders of
some of these very men. They had taken turns with him, and when, tired
at last, had placed the rail in the crotches of two convenient saplings,
and there left him. The crotch in front was considerably higher than
that behind, which circumstance gave him the appearance of clinging to
the back of an animal in the act of rearing frightfully, and exposed a
delicate part of his apparel that had been sadly rent by contact with
splinters. And there the wretch was clinging and groaning when Penn came
up.

"For the love of the Lord!" said Dan, "take me down!"

"Why, what is the matter? How came you here?"

"I'm a dead man; that's the matter! I've been wipped to death, and then
rode on a rail; that's the way I come here!"

"Whipped! what for?" said Penn, losing no time in cutting the sufferer's
bonds.

"Ye see," said Dan, when taken down and laid upon the ground, "the
patrolmen found Combs's boy Pete out t'other night without a pass, and
took him and tied him to a tree, and licked him."

The "boy Pete" was a negro man upwards of fifty years old, owned by the
said Combs.

"Wal, ye see, jest cause I found him, and took him home with me, and
washed his back fur him, and bound cotton on to it, and kep' him over
night, and gin him a good breakfast, and a drink o' suthin' strong in
the morning, and then went home with him, and talked with his master
so'st he wouldn't git another licking,--just for that, Sile Ropes and
his gang took me and served me wus'n ever they served him!" And the
broken-spirited man cried like a child at the recollection of his
injuries.

He was one of the "white trash" of the south, whom even the negroes
belonging to good families look down upon; a weak, degraded,
kind-hearted man, whose offence was not simply that he had shown mercy
to the "boy Pete," after his flogging, but that he associated on
familiar terms with such negroes as were not too proud to cultivate his
acquaintance, and secretly sold them whiskey. After repeated warnings,
he had been flogged, and treated to a ride on a three-cornered rail, and
hung up t