“I suppose I am your prisoner?”
Judah smiled. It was a terrible smile, and carried in it all the pent-up suffering of two years of bodily torture and a century of lacerated manhood. Thomson feared him, and well he might. Again he spoke. The sound of his own voice gave him courage; anything to break the horrible silence and the chill of that icy smile.
“I am to be treated as a prisoner of war?”
This time Judah answered him.
“Would you have treated me as a prisoner of war if you had captured me?”
“No,” broke involuntarily from Thomson’s lips.
“Very well!”
“I demand to be taken before Captain Brown. Surely he is human; he will not give me into the hands of a savage to be tortured!” exclaimed the wretch in frantic desperation.
Again Judah smiled his calm, dispassionate smile as he examined his rifle, and then slowly brought it to his shoulder.
“You who torture the slave without a thought of mercy, and who could treat a young white man—one of your own race—as you did Mr. Maxwell, fear to be tortured? Why, where is your boasted Southern bravery that has promised so much?”