For a time there was no other word to make the matter clearer! With his wolf-skin robe hanging from his shoulders, the chief stood contemplating the punishment he had decreed to his captive; a smile of exultation overspreading his face, as he thought of the pain his white victim was enduring.
It ended in a loud laugh, as he ordered the sufferer to be unloosed from his lashings; and dragged clear of the cross.
And the laugh broke forth again, as Blount Blackadder, half drowned, half dead from the aching pain in his skull, lay prostrate on the grass at his feet.
Then came from his lips an additional speech, the young planter might not have heard, but that smote upon the ears of the overseer with a meaning strangely intelligible.
“It’ll do for the present. Next time he offends in like manner, he shall be pumped upon till his thick skull splits like a cedar rail!”
Chapter Thirteen.
Making a Bolt.
At the new and still strange speech, Snively started again, and Clara Blackadder looked up with a yet still more puzzled expression; while among the blacks there ran a murmur of interrogatories and exclamations of terror.