"Aleck!" he cried, rousing himself with a laugh; "well, I should say so! Anybody would be loyal who'd been treated as my father treated Aleck. He took him out of jail and gave him a home, and would have looked after him till he died if the war hadn't broken out. Aleck wasn't raised on our plantation. He was a runaway from North Carolina. There were three of them that got across the river—a man and his wife and Aleck. The slave-driver had caught Aleck in our town and had locked him up in the caboose for safe-keeping. Then he came to my father to help him catch the other two. But my father wasn't that kind of a man. The old gentleman had curious notions about a good many things. He believed when a slave ran away that the fault was oftener the master's than the negro's. 'They are nothing but children,' he would say, 'and you must treat them like children. Whipping is a poor way to bring anybody up.'
"So when my father heard about the three runaways he refused to have anything to do with the case. This made the driver anxious.
"'Judge,' he said—my father had been a Judge of the County Court for years—'if you'll take the case I'll give you this boy Aleck as a fee. He's worth a thousand dollars.'
"'Send for him,' said my father. 'I'll tell you when I see him.'
"So they brought him in. He was a big, strong boy, with powerful shoulders, black as a chunk of coal, and had a look about him that made you trust him at first sight. My father believed in him the moment he saw him.
"'What did you run away for, Aleck?' he asked.
"The boy held his head down.
"'My mother died, Marster, an' I couldn't stay dar no mo'.'
"'I'll take him,' said my father; 'but on condition that the boy wants to live with me.'
"This was another one of the old gentleman's notions. He wouldn't have a negro on the place that he had to watch, nor one that wasn't happy.