“Just a moment,” said Campbell, with a wave of the hand. “I have not yet reached the point of my narrative. When the ambuscade broke cover there rushed upon me a giant negro. He looked,” and the young dragoon gazed about him, “he looked about the thickness of that big cottonwood; I am tall, but he simply towered above me as though I were a dwarf.”
“Campbell’s eyes were magnifying that night,” cried one, amid a burst of laughter from his companions. “He saw giants—possibly it was the genius of the swamp.”
“You may laugh,” protested Campbell, “that is what Blake did when I first told him. But it’s a fact, I tell you. When he rushed at me it would have gone hard with me had it not been for Sergeant Humphries, who took the first sweep of the black’s sabre upon his own. Humphries is no boy in weight, but, gentlemen, the force of the blow almost knocked him from the saddle.”
While Campbell was speaking, Mark Harwood, who formed one of the party, had been listening eagerly. Now he spoke.
“Did you notice,” he asked of Campbell, “a companion with this giant negro?”
“Well, Mr. Harwood,” laughed the strapping young dragoon, “he had a great many companions. We went flying, helter-skelter, through the swamp, with the whole lot of them hot at our heels.”
“But, I mean, was there not a person—a young man of about my age, but more of your size—whom the negro stuck to a great deal?”
Campbell looked thoughtfully at the speaker for a moment, then said:
“Come to think of it, there was. It seemed a great deal like master and man.”
“And that,” cried Mark Harwood, “was exactly what they were. The white youth was my rebel cousin, Tom Deering.”