II.
The overseer nodded, and chewing stolidly, lounged out into the yard, where stood the kitchen, smoke-house, and other outbuildings, and going on through the orchard, emerged upon a blinding space where a row of white-washed cabins, with the gin-house hard by, glared in the hot light. A few negro children, half naked, with a lean and sickly old hound, were grouped in the shade of the gin-house. Near them, in the full blaze of the sunlight, a negro man, in coarse plantation clothes of a dirty white, sat on the ground in a squatting posture, feebly shaking his bare head, to keep off the swarm of insects that tormented him. This was Antony. He was bound in a peculiar manner—bucked, as the plantation slang has it. The ankles were firmly lashed together—the knees drawn up to the chest—the wrists also firmly pinioned and passed over the knees, and between the elbow-joints and the knee-pits, a short stick was inserted, thus holding movelessly in a bundle of agonizing cramp the limbs of the victim. This infernal torture—practised by the tyrants of our marine on their sailors—that class whose helplessness and wrongs most nearly resemble those of slaves—practised also on wretched criminals by the tyrants of our jails—Antony had endured from midnight till now, about two o’clock in the afternoon.
Nine years Lafitte’s chattel, he had been badly used from time to time, and, of late, dreadfully. He had learned to read and write a little before he had come to the plantation, and a week before the present time he had picked up a scrap of newspaper on which was a fragment of one of those declamations about liberty, which southern politicians are fools enough to be making on all opportunities, amidst a land of slaves. The fragment had some swagger about the northern oppression of the South, which Antony did not understand any more than anybody else; but it rounded up with Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” which he understood very well; for from that moment Liberty or Death was a phrase which spoke like a voice in his mind, urging him to escape from his bondage. The next thing was to write a pass, make a package addressed to the house of Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, and with this evidence of his assumed mission endeavor to reach that city, where he meant to smuggle himself into the hold of some vessel northward bound.
Clad in an old suit of Mr. Tassle’s, which he had taken from the gin-house, and boldly riding away the night before, on a mare borrowed from Mr. Lafitte’s stables, he had been suddenly met on a turn of the road—unaccountably met at midnight—by his master and the overseer, who seized him and found his forged credentials upon him. At once, he had been violently beaten over the head with their whip-stocks driven back to the plantation, reclothed in his plantation suit, securely bound, and left with horrid threats of torment on the morrow. The morrow had come, and here he was in utter misery, half crazy, and more than half fancying that he was in Hell.
Mr. William Tassle, his tobacco revolving slowly in his open mouth, stood and stolidly surveyed him. A pitiable object, truly! His face was bruised and swollen, and from wounds in his brow and cheek, made by the blows of the whip-handles, a dull ooze of blood, thinned by his sweat, had spread its stain over the whole countenance. Around the wounds buzzed and clung greedy clusters of black flies, hardly driven off by the feeble motions of his head, and returning every instant. His dark face, ashen grey and flaccid under the crimson stain, and faint with suffering, wore a look of dumb endurance; his eyelids drooped heavily over his downcast eyes; and his breath came in short gasps through the bloody froth that had gathered on his loose mouth. His wrists were cut with the tight cords that bound them, and his hands were discolored and swollen, as were his ankles. Even the overseer felt a sort of rude pity for him.
“Well, Ant’ny,” said Mr. Tassle, slowly, pausing and turning his head aside to eject a vigorous squirt of tobacco juice, which lit upon a small chip and deluged a fly thereon, throwing the insect into quivering spasms of torture; “you’re in for it, you poor, mis’ble devil. Yer master’s goin’ to admonish ye, so he says. Know what that means, don’t ye? It’s all up with you, Ant’ny.”
The dumb, bruised face, with its blood-shot eyes, feebly turned up to his for a moment, then drooped away.
“Come, now,” said Mr. Tassle, cutting the negro’s bonds with two strokes of a jack-knife, “up with ye.”
Antony, suddenly released from his cramped posture, fell over; then made a feeble effort to crawl up on his hands and knees, tottered, sank down, and lay panting. Mr. Tassle started with alacrity for the gin-house, the black piccaninnies scampering and tumbling over each other in their scramble to get away, and the old hound sneaking after them. Presently he came back with a bucket of water and a gourd. Antony raised himself and drank from the gourd; then sat up, panting, but relieved.