Maybe he had made good his escape. For the latter she had hoped and prayed with the earnestness, desperation and despair with which she so long warded off the entreaties and appeals of Dodson when he first made the advances which finally culminated in the degradation of her life. Her miserable life was spent in his home only under compulsion, the compulsion of a labor contract entered into by her in legal form, a breach of which she knew from the experience of other colored women employed under such terms and conditions meant only one thing—a term of penal servitude at the hardest of the most degraded sort of labor!
So she had determined to carry out her part of the contract and at the end of it marry Leslie and settle down in a home of her own, to bless it, perhaps, with the voices of children and all the endearments which the relations of father, mother and child mean to mankind.
But in a world of strange and unfriendly relations, the only sort of a world which she had ever known, having been but eight years old on the day of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in the great white-heat of the conflict being waged by the whites of the North and the whites and the Negroes of the South in that great historical drama known all over the civilized world as the “Reconstruction Period!” What blighted hopes they should have been! Meditating over the hopelessness of her present plight, separated from her lover, whose body at that moment for all she knew might be dangling at the end of a rope, stung to the heart by hundreds of bullets from the guns of armed murderers; and without the reach, comfort and consolation of her father, who was at that time serving a sentence in the penitentiary for disposing of a crop under lien, the spirit of despair was rapidly enveloping her troubled soul, when lo, and behold, there appeared before her no other a person than Dodson on his swiftest mare with Leslie in tow, tied hard and fast to his saddle! As unexpected as a bolt of lightning from the clear blue sky and with the vigor and fierceness of a tiger she sprang between the horse and the bound boy and began biting and knawing at the rope with the voracity of a starving lion in contact with its hunk of meat.
At first Millard drew his pistol and threatened to shoot if she did not desist but paying no attention at all to his demands she kept on chewing the rope as if she had not heard, when Leslie managed to secure his knife from his pocket and get it into her hands with which she cut the rope in two, and set her lover free. Then facing her traducer and heaping curse after curse upon him and daring him to shoot, she managed to distract his attention from Leslie and give the latter time to get out of reach, which he did, remaining, however, near by in concealment ready at any moment to spring upon his adversary and engage him in mortal combat if further harm threatened his sweetheart.
For the purpose of making Leslie’s escape secure. Matilda consented to return with Dodson on condition that the charges against her lover be withdrawn and he be allowed to leave the country unmolested by any mob or officers of the law; and seating herself behind him on his swift, gay, young horse the two had scarcely begun the journey back home when the girl spied Leslie in hiding. With the dexterity of a born adroit sleuth she extracted from one of the pockets in the back of Dodson’s pants the pistol with which he had failed to frighten her and dropped it silently in the dust before the eyes of Leslie, all unknown to Dodson. In the next few moments the latter was looking down the barrel of his own gun, his teeth chattering as if suddenly attacked by a chill and his whole body shaking and quivering as if in the throes of an ague. He very quickly consented to be bound hand and foot and tied to a tree in the woods some distance from the road-side and forever abandon the prosecution of Leslie, and permit Matilda to go in peace and trouble her no more, as the price of his life, now at the mercy of those whose liberty of body and soul less than an hour before was entirely in his hands to be dealt with as he wished.
CHAPTER XII.
Great Progress of Negro.
The predicament of Millard was rendered all the more distressing by the engagement of most of his friends in the conspiracy against the life of “Uncle” Alex Bettis. They were not in ignorance, however, of the chase for Leslie Duncan and the desire to get into it themselves probably hastened the brief consultation which resulted in the release of Bettis on his promise to see to it that the classes of study in his school included agriculture and not social and political economy. Besides Brother Bettis’ prayer was a masterful plea for the forgiveness of the sins of those bent on taking his life. It was pathetic. Some of the mob shed tears, real heart-felt tears, that flow from the heart in our moments of contemplation of the generousness of God and beauty of his handiwork as naturally as rain from a mountain summer cloud.
Those who felt the Omnipotent power of God in the kindness and prayers of this simple old colored man counselled with the more marble-hearted and vicious of their number, and all at last agreed that while the old man’s magnetic influence and his powerful, mysterious control over himself in a period of the greatest suspense might prove a monster with which they would have to deal later on, none could have the heart wicked enough to put him to death.
So Mr. Bettis demonstrated a strategic ability that should prove to be the admiration of white men, learned and skilled in the art of strategy, as well as proved conclusively in his own case, the efficacy and power of prayer. Until the day of his death he always maintained that it was not the delay which the preparation of the dinner occasioned giving him time to influence the men against taking his life; nor, indeed the kindness displayed in the act of feeding and nourishing his enemies, but wholly and absolutely the power of God in answer to prayer!