ntil then, if you will keep
quiet. If the doctor asks you how the wound was caused, you can say that
you were struck by the bullet fired from the woods. It would do you no
good to have it known that you were shot while attempting to escape."

The prisoner uttered no word of thanks or apology, but sat in sullen
silence. When the wounded arm had been bandaged, Polly and her father
returned to the house.

The sheriff was in an unusually thoughtful mood that evening. He put
salt in his coffee at supper, and poured vinegar over his pancakes. To
many of Polly's questions he returned random answers. When he had gone
to bed he lay awake for several hours.

In the silent watches of the night, when he was alone with God, there
came into his mind a flood of unaccustomed thoughts. An hour or two
before, standing face to face with death, he had experienced a sensation
similar to that which drowning men are said to feel--a kind of
clarifying of the moral faculty, in which the veil of the flesh, with
its obscuring passions and prejudices, is pushed aside for a moment, and
all the acts of one's life stand out, in the clear light of truth, in
their correct proportions and relations,--a state of mind in which one
sees himself as God may be supposed to see him. In the reaction
following his rescue, this feeling had given place for a time to far
different emotions. But now, in the silence of midnight, something of
this clearness of spirit returned to the sheriff. He saw that he had
owed some duty to this son of his,--that neither law nor custom could
destroy a responsibility inherent in the nature of mankind. He could not
thus, in the eyes of God at least, shake off the consequences of his
sin. Had he never sinned, this wayward spirit would never have come back
from the vanished past to haunt him. As these thoughts came, his anger
against the mulatto died away, and in its place there sprang up a great
pity. The hand of parental authority might have restrained the passions
he had seen burning in the prisoner's eyes when the desperate man spoke
the words which had seemed to doom his father to death. The sheriff
felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit from the slough of
slavery; that he might have sent him to the free North, and given him
there, or in some other land, an opportunity to turn to usefulness and
honorable pursuits the talents that had run to crime, perhaps to
madness; he might, still less, have given this son of his the