Chapter Eighty Eight.
Quick Executioners.
I turned to the black for an explanation, but before he could make reply to my interrogatory, I more than half comprehended the situation.
My own plight admonished me. I remembered my wound—I remembered that I had received it from behind. I remembered that the bullet that struck the tree, came from the same quarter. I thought we had been indebted to the savages for the shots; but no, worse savages—Spence and Williams were the men who had fired them!
The reflection was awful—the motive mysterious.
And now returned to my thoughts the occurrences of the preceding night—the conduct of these two fellows in the forest—the suspicious hints thrown out by old Hickman and his comrades, and far beyond the preceding night, other circumstances, well marked upon my memory, rose freshly before me.
Here again was the hand of Arens Ringgold. O God, to think that this arch-monster—
“Dar only a tryin’ them two daam raskell,” said Jake, in reply to the interrogatory I had put, “daat’s what they am about, Mass’r George, dat’s all.”
“Who?” I asked mechanically, for I already knew who were meant by the “two daam raskell.”