“Stand still, good dog! Steady, and let me slip this round your neck. Don’t be skeeart. I’m not goin’ to hang you—only to keep you quiet a bit.”
The animal makes no resistance; but yields to the manipulation, believing it to be by a friendly hand, and for its good.
In a trice the cord is knotted around its neck; and the mulatto looks out for a tree to which he may attach it.
A thought now strikes him, another step calling for caution. It will not do to let the dog see him go off, or know the direction he takes; for some one will be sure to come in search of Clancy, and set the hound loose. Still, time will likely elapse; the scent will be cold, as far as the creek’s edge, and cannot be lifted. With the water beyond there will be no danger.
The runaway, glancing around, espies a palmetto brake; these forming a sort of underwood in the cypress forest, their fan-shaped leaves growing on stalks that rise directly out of the earth to a height of three or four feet, covering the ground with a chevaux de frise of deepest green, but hirsute and spinous as hedgehogs.
The very place for his purpose. So mutters he to himself, as he conducts the dog towards it. Still thinking the same, after he has tied the animal to a palmetto shank near the middle of the brake, and there left it. He goes off, regardless of its convulsive struggles to set itself free, with accompanying yelps, by which the betrayed quadruped seems to protest against such unexpected as ill-deserved, captivity.
Not five minutes time has all this action occupied. In less than five more a second chapter is complete, by the carrying of Clancy’s body—it may be his corpse—to the creek, and laying it along the bottom of the canoe.
Notwithstanding the weight of his burden, the mulatto, a man of uncommon strength, takes care to make no footmarks along the forest path, or at the point of embarkation. The ground, thickly strewn with the leaves of the deciduous taxodium, does not betray a trace, any more than if he were treading on thrashed straw.
Undoing the slip-knot of his painter, he shoves the canoe clear of its entanglement among the roots of the tree. Then plying his paddle, directs its course down stream, silently as he ascended, but with look more troubled, and air intensely solemnal. This continuing, while he again shoulders the insensible form, and carries it along the causeway of logs, until he has laid it upon soft moss within the cavity of the cypress—his own couch. Then, once more taking Clancy’s wrist between his fingers, and placing his ear opposite the heart, he feels the pulse of the first, and listens for the beatings of the last.
A ray of joy illuminates his countenance, as both respond to his examination. It grows brighter, on perceiving a muscular movement of the limbs, late rigid and seemingly inanimate, a light in the eyes looking like life; above all, words from the lips so long mute. Words low-murmured, but still distinguishable; telling him a tale, at the same time giving its interpretation. That in this hour of his unconsciousness Clancy should in his speech couple the names of Richard Darke and Helen Armstrong is a fact strangely significant, he does the same for many days, in his delirious ravings; amid which the mulatto, tenderly nursing him, gets the clue to most of what has happened.