The scoundrel in question smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“Yoosoof,” cried Disco, clenching his fist and looking full in the trader’s eyes, “when I last saw yer ugly face, I vowed that if ever I seed it again I’d leave my mark on it pretty deep, I did; and now I does see it again, but I haven’t the moral courage to touch sitch a poor, pitiful, shrivelled-up package o’ bones an’ half-tanned leather. Moreover, I’m goin’ to be indebted to ’ee! Ha! ha!” (he laughed bitterly, and with a dash of wild humour in the tone), “to travel under yer care, an’ eat yer accursed bread, and—and—oh! there ain’t no sitch thing as shame left in my corpus. I’m a low mean-spirited boastful idiot, that’s wot I am, an’ I don’t care the fag-end of a hunk o’ gingerbread who knows it.”
After this explosion the sorely tried mariner brought his right hand down on his thigh with a tremendous crack, turned about and walked away to cool himself.
Chapter Twenty One.
Progress of the Slave-Run—The Deadly Swamp, and the Unexpected Rescue.
We will now leap over a short period of time—about two or three weeks—during which the sable procession had been winding its weary way over hill and dale, plain and swamp.
During that comparatively brief period, Harold and Disco had seen so much cruelty and suffering that they both felt a strange tendency to believe that the whole must be the wild imaginings of a horrible dream. Perhaps weakness, resulting from illness, might have had something to do with this peculiar feeling of unbelief, for both had been subject to a second, though slight, attack of fever. Nevertheless, coupled with their scepticism was a contradictory and dreadful certainty that they were not dreaming, but that what they witnessed was absolute verity.
It is probable that if they had been in their ordinary health and vigour they would have made a violent attempt to rescue the slaves, even at the cost of their own lives. But severe and prolonged illness often unhinges the mind as well as the body, and renders the spirit all but impotent.