the wagon was overset.

The negro picked up his helpless fellow-African and lifted him on his
back, starting off in mingled avarice and terror, and saying,

"Derrick's gwyn home, sho'. See me, see me!"

Van Dorn put his finger at his throat, where blood was all the while
trickling, and, with a gentle cough, extorted the sounds:

"Leave me--under a bush--to--die."

"No," cried Sorden, raising Van Dorn also upon his back; "I love him as
I never loved A male."

The fire of the burning jail lighted their return into the outskirts of
Dover and to the gallows' hill, where stood the scaffold, split with the
lightning from cross-beam to the death-trap. As they halted opposite it
to rest, a horse and rider came stumbling past, and Molleston, dropping
his burden, shouted:

"Bill Greenley, dat's our hoss. We want it."

"His is the hoss that's on him," cried the escaped horse-thief, looking
scornfully up at his own gallows as he lashed his blinded animal along
in the rain.

"Cheer up, Captain Van," John Sorden said, soaked through with the rain;
"'t'ain't fur now to Cooper's Corners."

CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO WHIGS.

"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standing
before his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops in
the public square of Dover.

Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elms
and locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-driven
floods of rain.

"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightning
appalling, and I thought I heard firearms, too."

Judge Custis heard Clayton say, as he entered the room:

"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did
he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black
people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"

"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.

Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean
suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:

"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"

The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:

"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt
Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last
night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off,
and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin'
last night to Mr.