ot murder your own father?"

"My father?" replied the mulatto. "It were well enough for me to claim
the relationship, but it comes with poor grace from you to ask anything
by reason of it. What father's duty have you ever performed for me? Did
you give me your name, or even your protection? Other white men gave
their colored sons freedom and money, and sent them to the free States.
_You_ sold _me_ to the rice swamps."

"I at least gave you the life you cling to," murmured the sheriff.

"Life?" said the prisoner, with a sarcastic laugh. "What kind of a life?
You gave me your own blood, your own features,--no man need look at us
together twice to see that,--and you gave me a black mother. Poor
wretch! She died under the lash, because she had enough womanhood to
call her soul her own. You gave me a white man's spirit, and you made me
a slave, and crushed it out."

"But you are free now," said the sheriff. He had not doubted, could not
doubt, the mulatto's word. He knew whose passions coursed beneath that
swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes opposite his own. He saw in
this mulatto what he himself might have become had not the safeguards of
parental restraint and public opinion been thrown around him.

"Free to do what?" replied the mulatto. "Free in name, but despised and
scorned and set aside by the people to whose race I belong far more than
to my mother's."

"There are schools," said the sheriff. "You have been to school." He had
noticed that the mulatto spoke more eloquently and used better language
than most Branson County people.

"I have been to school, and dreamed when I went that it would work some
marvelous change in my condition. But what did I learn? I learned to
feel that no degree of learning or wisdom will change the color of my
skin and that I shall always wear what in my own country is a badge of
degradation. When I think about it seriously I do not care particularly
for such a life. It is the animal in me, not the man, that flees the
gallows. I owe you nothing," he went on, "and expect nothing of you; and
it would be no more than justice if I should avenge upon you my mother's
wrongs and my own. But still I hate to shoot you; I have never yet taken
human life--for I did _not_ kill the old captain. Will you promise to
give no alarm and make no attempt to capture me until morning, if I do
not shoot?"

So absorbed were the two men in their colloquy and their own tumultuous
thoughts that neither