“I ain’t a-goin’ t’eat any more in this worl’,” he said.
“Well, I reckon you won’t gorge yorese’f in the next,” said Mrs. Gill, “but I want to say that what you are contemplatin’ is a sin.” She turned back into the cabin and sat at the table and poured her husband’s coffee in disturbed silence.
“I believe on my soul he’s goin’ to make a die of it,” she said, after a while, as she sat munching a piece of dry bread, having no appetite at all. And Gill, deeply troubled, could make no reply.
It was their habit to go to bed as soon as supper was over, so when they rose from the table Mrs. Gill turned down the covers of the high-posted bed and beat the pillows. Before barring the cabin door, she scrutinized the closed shutter directly opposite, but all was still as death in the room of the slave.
For the first night in many years the old pair found they could not sleep, their brains being still active with the first great problem of their lives. The little clock struck ten. The silence of the night was disturbed by the shrilling of tree-frogs and the occasional cry of the whip-poor-will.
Suddenly Gill sprang up with a little grunt of alarm. “What’s that?” he asked.
“It sounded powerful like somebody a-groanin’,” whispered Mrs. Gill. “Oh, Lordy, Peter, I have a awful feelin’!”
“I ’ll git up an’ see what’s ailin’ ‘im,” said Gill, a little more calmly. “Mebby the idiot has done without food till he’s took cramps.”
Dressing himself hastily, he went outside. A pencil of yellow light was streaming through a crack beneath Big Joe’s door. Gill had not put on his shoes, and his feet fell softly on the grass. Putting his ear to the door of the negro’s room, he overheard low groans and words which sounded like a prayer, repeated over and over in a sing-song fashion. Later he heard something like the sobbing of a bigchested man.
“Open up!” cried Gill, shaking the door; “open up, I say!”