sses. He was not
ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been
unheard.

Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like
a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing
that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned
and stood still, leaning upon his spade.

"Hi, there! Stop!" bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added
horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.

But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It
was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his
face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient
to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.

Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two
negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a
bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave
had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years
ago.

"After him, you black swine!" he roared at them. But as they started he
checked them. "Wait! Get to heel, damn you!"

It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not
the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that
cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell
him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that
close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, be
reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew
a dozen ways--some of them quite diverting--of conquering stubbornness
in these convict dogs.

He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat
internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with
cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.

"Who was that runagate?" he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over on
his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably
on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do
nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.

The planter's bamboo cane fell on the lad's naked shoulders with
stinging force.

"Answer me, you dog! What's his name?"

Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.

"I don't know," he sai