Out from the shadows of the trees came figures and voices.
“Hold the light. He ain’t dead, is he?” queried the familiar voice of Bill Thomson.
“Looks like it, but reckon he’s only wounded,” replied Gideon Holmes, Bill’s lieutenant.
Thomson bent over the insensible man, deftly feeling his heart’s motion. Then he raised himself and stood looking down thoughtfully on the youth.
It was a motley crowd of Southern desperadoes, men who stopped at nothing in the line of murder and rapine.
“Say, Jim,” whispered a slight, thin man to his neighbor, “I wouldn’t be in that young feller’s shoes fer money——”
“What’s he studyin’, do ye reckon, Dan?”
“Hell!” was the expressive answer.
“What’s agin the boy?” asked Jim.
“Stole two o’ his niggers, so he says.”