“I do’ want you to kill him, Nelse, so you’ll git into trouble; but jes’ give him one good whippin’ for those he used to give you.”
“Go on away from the house;” and the man’s lips were tightly closed. She threw a thin shawl over her head and went out.
As soon as she had gone Nelse’s intense feeling got the better of him, and, falling down with his face in a chair, he cried, in the language which the Sunday sermons had taught him, “Lord, Lord, thou hast delivered mine enemy into my hands!”
But it was not a prayer; it was rather a cry of anger and anguish from an overburdened heart. He rose, with the same hard gleam in his eyes, and went back toward the kitchen. One hand was tightly clinched till the muscles and veins stood out like cords, and with the other he unconsciously fingered the lash’s scar.
“Couldn’t find your folks, eh, Nelse?” said the white Hatton.
“No,” growled Nelse; and continued hurriedly, “Do you remember that scar?”
“Well enough—well enough,” answered the other, sadly; “and it must have hurt you, Nelse.”
“Hurt me! yes,” cried the Negro.
“Ay,” said Tom Hatton, as he rose and put his hand softly on the black scar; “and it has hurt me many a day since, though time and time again I have suffered pains that were as cruel as this must have been to you. Think of it, Nelse; there have been times when I, a Hatton, have asked bread of the very people whom a few years ago I scorned. Since the War everything has gone against me. You do not know how I have suffered. For thirty years life has been a curse to me; but I am going back to Kentucky now, and when I get there I’ll lay it down without a regret.”
All the anger had melted from the Negro’s face, and there were tears in his eyes as he cried, “You sha’n’t do it, Mas’ Tom,—you sha’n’t do it.”