“My brother had a nigger that wore this collar once,” said the smooth, cruel voice, “and now you’ll wear it. If you ever get away again, which I’ll take care you never will, people will know who you belong to, my fine boy. Kneel down here.”
Antony felt the sullen hatred seethe up in his heart, and his brain reeled.
“I won’t have that collar on me, Marster,” he huskily muttered. “You may kill me, Marster, but I won’t have that collar on me.”
“You won’t, eh?” returned Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly. “Oh, well then, if you won’t, you won’t. By the way,” he pursued, carelessly taking the paper from the table, and fanning himself gently, “do you know how I knew you were going to run away? I’ll tell you. I was standing near the gin-house last night when you came there to steal Tassle’s old clothes, and I heard you say to yourself—‘Now for liberty or death.’ Ah, ha, Antony, you shouldn’t talk aloud! Tassle and I saw you go to the stable and take the mare, and then we saddled and headed you off, my nigger. That’s the way of it. Pick up that paper.”
Raising his eyes to his tyrant’s feet, Antony saw the folded paper there where it had been dropped. Approaching, he painfully stooped to pick it up, when he felt himself seized, thrown down upon his knees, and the collar, which opened in the centre on a strong hinge, was around his neck! He struggled to free himself, but he was held, and the collar closed. In an instant a key of peculiar wards inserted in one of the cusps of this devilish necklace, shot a bolt into the socket of the other, and Mr. Lafitte, taking out the key, and putting it into his pocket, quietly spat in the face of the man whose neck he had just fettered, and spurning him violently with his foot, hurled him backward from his knees with a dreadful shock over on the floor.
Stunned for a moment, Antony lay motionless on his side. He knew that his master had risen, for as he turned his head, he saw the hideous shadow dart suddenly from the pool, and vanish, as though it had entered the planter. On his feet the next instant, with a dark cloud of blood bellowing in his brain, he saw with bloodshot eyes, Lafitte standing before him, with a calm, infernal smile on his visage, and all the tiger in his tawny orbs. The next second Madame Lafitte swept, like a superb ghost, between him and his revenge.
“Stay, Josephine,” yelled the planter, his voice no longer issuing smooth and soft from the throat, but tearing up from his lungs in a loud, harsh snarl—“remain here. This entertainment is for you. You object to the howls of my black curs. I bring one here—into this room—whose howls shall split your ears.”
She turned, as he spoke, on the threshold of the room, and advancing toward him, paused. For one instant she stood, imperial in her beauty, her magnificent form drawn to its full height, her haughty brow corrugated, her eyes burning like bale-fires, her outraged blood flooding her countenance with one vivid crimson glow. The next instant she strode forward, and smote him a sounding buffet on the face. Then, without a word, and with the step of an empress, she swept from the room.
Lafitte turned purple and livid in spots, and tottering back, fell into his chair. Struck! By her! Before his slave! Glaring up, he met the blood-shot eyes of Antony.