"What was the trouble?"
"Well, one was a-gambling, and the other struck the overseer what was a-whippin' him."
"Whipping him!"—in horrified exclamation, quite as much at Aunt Rachel's matter-of-fact way of regarding the matter as at the deed itself.
"Yas'm. He didn't do his work right and he whipped him. I speck he needed it."
"But he's a grown man," Miss Smith urged earnestly.
"Yas'm; he's twenty now, and big."
"Whipped him!" Miss Smith repeated. "And so you can't leave?"
"No'm, he say he'll sell us out and put us in de chain-gang if we go. The boys is plumb mad, but I'se a-pleadin' with 'em not to do nothin' rash."
"But—but I thought they had already started to work a crop on the Tolliver place?"
"Yes'm, dey had; but, you see, dey were arrested, and then Cunnel Cresswell took 'em and 'lowed they couldn't leave his place. Ol' man Tolliver was powerful mad."