"Dunno, massa, but reckon he'm to hum."
"One of you boys go and bring him to the cabin," said the Colonel.
A negro man went off on the errand, while we and the darkies resumed our way to the overseer's quarters. Arrived there, I witnessed a scene that words cannot picture.
Stretched at full length on the floor, his clothes torn to shreds, his coarse carroty hair matted with blood, and his thin, ugly visage pale as death, lay the overseer. Bending over him, wiping away the blood from his face, and swathing a ghastly wound on his forehead, was the negress Sue; while at his shackled feet, binding up his still bleeding legs, knelt the octoroon woman!
"Is she here?" I said, involuntarily, as I caught sight of the group.
"It's her nature," said the Colonel, with a pleasant smile; "if Moye were the devil himself, she'd do him good if she could; another such woman never lived."
And yet this woman, with all the instincts that make her sex angel-ministers to man, lived in daily violation of the most sacred of all laws—because she was a slave. Can Mr. Caleb Cushing or Charles O'Conor tell us why the Almighty invented a system which forces his creatures to break laws of His own making?
"Don't waste your time on him, Alice," said the Colonel, kindly; "he isn't worth the rope that'll hang him."
"He was bleeding to death; unless he has care he'll die," said the octoroon woman.
"Then let him die, d—— him," replied the Colonel, advancing to where the overseer lay, and bending down to satisfy himself of his condition.