took the child again and amused it while the woman carefully cleaned
his wound and rebandaged it so that he could breathe and see and eat,
though the cotton folds wrapped in much of his face like a mask. He then
examined the chain again, especially where it was rivetted at the feet,
and lifted a large iron ball weighing several pounds, which was also
affixed to her ankle, so that she could not climb the tree. Her ankle he
found blistered by the red-hot rivet being smithed so barbarously close
to the flesh.

"Don't leave me, oh! don't leave me here to die," the woman pleaded, as
he started into the woods.

"I'll stay by you an' we'll die together, if we must; but it's not my
idee to die at all, Mary. I'm goin' to bring that air scow ashore while
I cut a hickory, if I can find one, to break this yer chain."

Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the
scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw
come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the
_Ellenora Dennis_, and stand towards the island in the cripple.

"The tide's agin' em, an' they must make a tack to get yer," Jimmy
muttered; "but I'm afraid this knife will have to go to the heart of
some son of Pangymonum in ten minutes, or Ellenory Dennis never agin be
pestered by her ugly lover."

He was seized with a certain frenzy of strength and discernment at the
danger he was in, and, as he carried the scow onward and across the
woodland island, heavy as it was, he also noted a single small hickory
tree on that farther margin, and threw himself against it and bent it
down, and plunged his knife into the straining fibres so that it
crackled and splintered in his hand. He leaped to the tree and scaled it
as he had often climbed a mast, and he thrust the sapling under the
staple, trimming the point down with the knife as he clutched the tree
by his knees, and then, catching the young hickory like a lever, he
dropped down the pine trunk and got his shoulder under the sapling and
brought the weight of his body desperately against it. The staple bent
upward in the tree, but did not loosen.

At that instant the scraping of a boat upon the mud was heard, and the
black woman fell upon her knees.

"Pray, but do it soft," Jimmy whispered; "an' not a cry from the child,
or there'll be a murder!"

He had rapidly trimmed the hickory stem of its branches while he spoke,
so that it could penetrate the arborage of the