He swore an oath, half blasphemous, half blackguard, and the captain murmured, with a lisp:
"The white man is the only witness. Make sure of him!"
Irons were produced, and the captain speedily fastened Phœbus's hands in a clevis, and hobbled his feet, and placed him, without brutality, in the pen, and, further, chained him there to a ring in the joist below. As the door was closed and bolted, a voice from the darkness of the pen cried out:
"Aunt Patty, let me out: I saved the captain's life; I took the white man's knife. I'll serve you faithfully if you only let me go."
"He blowed the gab," said Joe Johnson, "but it won't serve him."
"Zeke," cried the woman, "it's no use. You go to Georgey with the next gang—you an' the white nigger thar."
The man threw himself upon the floor and moaned and prayed, as the lamplight disappeared and the hatchway slid echoingly over the stairs, and the lower bolts were drawn. As he lay there in horror and amid contempt, a voice arrested his ears near by, singing, with musical and easy spirit, so low that it seemed a hymn, from the roads and fields far down beneath:
"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
In dis weak, helpless soul."
The man listened with awe and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune, and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy Phœbus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for her.
"Poor Mary!" Phœbus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn cadence.