"Now here!" The guard's voice rang out in the grove. "I know you, Abercrombie, and I know your game, you bloody, long-whiskered, knife-totin' throat-cutter. You are tryin' to make friends with that dog!"
He went to a near-by bush, got out his knife, and cut a heavy switch.
"Take this," he commanded. "Oh, you can catch hold of it! Catch it with both hands. Never mind the bracelets. Take it. Hit that dog. Hit him!"
The dreamlike state in which the old man had been wandering dissolved. His eyes narrowed to mere slits behind the beetling brows. The cold steel of the mountaineer, the mountaineer who weighs his words, was in the slow-drawled reply:
"Wal, now, I reckon I won't."
A moment they faced one another, Simmons' eyes murderous. Some fear of an investigation if he struck the old man, something daunting, too, that he saw in the mountaineer's eyes, restrained him.
"Abercrombie," he said, and moistened his lips with his tongue, "I brought out in that car three boxes of shotgun shells—buckshot—extra heavy loaded. Get me?"
Such was the initiation of old Tom Abercrombie as a convict. That afternoon he was entered on the books as a "dangerous" prisoner; that night he lay on an iron cot, staring up at the roof of a solitary tent, which, according to law, had to be provided for him. On his ankles were locked two steel anklets connected by a chain eighteen inches long. This chain, in turn, was locked to the cot.
Shame lay with him as he stared upward—shame and a terrible loneliness and dread of the future. At sunset he had watched a long line of shackled Negroes, followed by guards with shotguns, file into camp. To-morrow he himself would be one of that gang; and not only to-morrow, but for two years. Assault and Battery with Intent to Kill—this was the verdict of the court in Greenville in which he had been tried. And yet he hadn't intended to kill anybody, he had only meant to remonstrate.