on mincing feet and danced over him, and fluttered his torn
shirt-sleeve.

Stonily, voicelessly, Neptune stood in the cabin door, staring at
that which lay in the pathway. Then he lowered the smoking gun, and
leaned on it. His bald head drooped until his gray beard swept his
breast, and his throat rattled like a dying man's. Shudders went
over him. And stonily young Peter Champneys stood beside him, his
boyish eyes hard in a dead-white face, his boyish mouth a grim, pale
line.

"Peter," said the old man presently, in a thin whisper, "I helped
raise dat boy. Wuz n't sich a bad boy, neither. Used to sing en
wissle roun' de house, en fetch water en fiah-wood. Chloe, she loved
'im. Used to say Ouah Fathuh right in dis same room 'fo' he went to
sleep. Ef I 'd 'a' knowed--

"En dat po' lil w'ite chile's daddy en mammy, _dey_ done raise
'er--used to say 'er prayers--en laff en sing--en trus' de Almighty
Gawd--"

He raised his sinewy arms and shook the gun aloft.

"Ah, Gawd Almighty! Gawd Almighty! Whah is You dis night? Whah is
You?" cried the old man. And of a sudden he began to weep
dreadfully; heart-broken cries of pain and of protest, the tortured
cries of one suffering inhumanly.

"And all this while God said not a word."

Shaken to the soul, full of sick horror, and loathing, and rage,
Peter Champneys yet had a swift, intuitive understanding of old
Neptune; and as if through him he had caught a glimpse of the naked
and suffering soul of the black people, the boy began to weep with
him. With understanding merging into pity he crept nearer and put
his slender, boyish arm around the big, shaking, agonized figure,
and the old man turned his head and looked long and sorrowfully into
the white child's face. He put out the big, seamed, work-hardened
hand that had labored since it could hold an implement to labor
with, and laid it on the child's shoulder.

Then, bareheaded and empty-handed, Neptune sat down on his cabin
steps to wait for what should happen, and Peter Champneys sat beside
him, the gun between his knees. Over there by the fowl-house lay
Jake, a horrid blotch in the moonlight.

Presently, echoing through the River Swamp, the hunting hounds set
up their thrilling, deep-mouthed belling. They were closing in on
their quarry and the nearness of it excited them. A few minutes
later, and here they were, a posse of some thirty or forty mounted
men struggling pell-mell after them. One great hound leaped forwar