“That’s unfortunate for you. Now, you see this?” taking a glowing faggot from the fire and blowing upon it. “With this I am about to tickle the soles of your feet until you do know. Come! Out with it,” and he approached his victim.
“Mercy, mercy! I’ll tell you, Baas,” pleaded the mulatto.
“Well?”
“It’s Wallace—Cap’n Wallace, Baas.”
“Oh. No lies, mind,” said Claverton, with a determined look. “You know me. I stand no nonsense. Well, now, where did you first fall in with this Captain Wallace?”
“At Port Elizabeth.”
“Who is he?”
“That I don’t know, really, Baas,” pleaded the fellow, piteously. “He’s going to raise a levy and fight the Kafirs, and he wanted me to join it.”
“H’m. I believe the first statement, the last is a lie. No more lies, friend Sharkey, if you please, or we shall quarrel. And now, tell me, how do you purpose earning your hundred pounds?”
The mulatto’s face grew livid as death, and great beads of perspiration stood out upon his forehead. He knew that from this man, whose murder he had just been plotting, he need expect no mercy; and he read his doom in every line of the other’s features, as he stared at his captor with the haggard and hunted expression of a trapped wild creature. Again his shaking lips reiterated a prayer for mercy.