“A faint heart, Captain Wharton, would do but little here. Come, here is a black shroud for your good-looking countenance,” taking, at the same time, a parchment mask, and fitting it to the face of Henry. “The master and the man must change places for a season.”
“I don’t t’ink he look a bit like me,” said Cæsar, with disgust, as he surveyed his young master with his new complexion.
“Stop a minute, Cæsar,” said the peddler, with a drollery that at times formed part of his manner, “till we get on the wool.”
“He worse than ebber now,” cried the discontented African. “A t’ink colored man like a sheep! I nevver see sich a lip, Harvey; he most as big as a sausage!”
“There is but one man in the American army who could detect you, Captain Wharton,” said the peddler.
“And who is he?”
“The man who made you prisoner. He would see your white skin through a plank. But strip, both of you; your clothes must be exchanged from head to foot.”
Cæsar, who had received minute instructions from the peddler in their morning interview, immediately commenced throwing aside his coarse garments, which the youth took up and prepared to invest himself with.
In the manner of the peddler there was an odd mixture of care and humor. “Here, captain,” he said, taking up some loose wool, and beginning to stuff the stockings of Cæsar, which were already on the legs of the prisoner; “some judgment is necessary in shaping this limb. You will display it on horseback; and the southern dragoons are so used to the brittle-shins that, should they notice your well-turned calf, they’d know at once it never belonged to a black.”