d of all mankind, hatred especially of the man to whom he
attributed all his misfortunes. One who is suffering unjustly is not apt
to indulge in fine abstractions, nor to balance probabilities. By long
brooding over his wrongs, his mind became, if not unsettled, at least
warped, and he imagined that Colonel Thornton had deliberately set a
trap into which he had fallen. The Colonel, he convinced himself, had
disapproved of his prosperity, and had schemed to destroy it. He
reasoned himself into the belief that he represented in his person the
accumulated wrongs of a whole race, and Colonel Thornton the race who
had oppressed them. A burning desire for revenge sprang up in him, and
he nursed it until his sentence expired and he was set at liberty. What
he had learned since reaching home had changed his desire into a deadly
purpose.

When he had again bandaged his feet and slipped them into his shoes, he
looked around him, and selected a stout sapling from among the
undergrowth that covered the bank of the stream. Taking from his pocket
a huge clasp-knife, he cut off the length of an ordinary walking stick
and trimmed it. The result was an ugly-looking bludgeon, a dangerous
weapon when in the grasp of a strong man.

With the stick in his hand, he went on down the road until he approached
a large white house standing some distance back from the street. The
grounds were filled with a profusion of shrubbery. The negro entered the
gate and secreted himself in the bushes, at a point where he could hear
any one that might approach.

It was near midday, and he had not eaten. He had walked all night, and
had not slept. The hope of meeting his loved ones had been meat and
drink and rest for him. But as he sat waiting, outraged nature asserted
itself, and he fell asleep, with his head on the rising root of a tree,
and his face upturned.

And as he slept, he dreamed of his childhood; of an old black mammy
taking care of him in the daytime, and of a younger face, with soft
eyes, which bent over him sometimes at night, and a pair of arms which
clasped him closely. He dreamed of his past,--of his young wife, of his
bright children. Somehow his dreams all ran to pleasant themes for a
while.

Then they changed again. He dreamed that he was in the convict camp,
and, by an easy transition, that he was in hell, consumed with hunger,
burning with thirst. Suddenly the grinning devil who stood over him with
a barbed whip faded away, and a