"Now you two lie down," Nat said after they had chatted for an hour. "I am accustomed to night watches and can sleep with one ear open, but I am convinced that there is not the slightest need for any of us keeping awake. When the lantern is out, which it will be as soon as you lie down, if all the negroes came up into the woods to search for us I should have no fear of their finding us."
Dinah, however, insisted upon taking a share in watching, saying that she was constantly sitting up at night with sick people.
Finding that she was quite determined, Nat said: "Very well, Dinah. It is ten o'clock now. I will watch till one o'clock, and then you can watch till four. We shall be able to start then."
"It won't be like light till five. No good start troo wood before that. I'se sure to wake at one o'clock. I'se accustomed to wake any hour so as to give medicines."
"Very well, Dinah; I suppose you must have your way."
Myra and the nurse therefore lay down, while Nat sat thinking over the events of the day and the prospects of the future. He had said nothing to the negress of the conversation that he had overheard, as on the way from the house they had walked one behind the other and there had been no opportunity for conversation, and he would not on any account have Myra or her mother know the fate that these villains had proposed for them. He wondered now whether he had done rightly in abstaining from shooting one of them, but after thinking it over in every way he came to the conclusion that it was best to have acted as he did, for they clearly intended to do all in their power to save mother and daughter from being massacred at once by the negroes.
"Even if the worst comes to the worst," he said to himself, "they have pistols, and I know will, as a last resource, use them against themselves."