Chapter Six.
A Terrible Execution, and a Narrow Escape.
One after the other my white companions were led out for execution. Every moment I expected that my turn would come. Very few showed any great signs of fear, with the exception of the overseers, who had been often and often the actual instruments of cruelty towards those who now had them in their power. I am surprised that the ignorant savage blacks did not torture them as they had themselves been tortured, before putting an end to their existence. Perhaps they wished to set an example of leniency to the civilised whites. They went about the execution, however, with deliberation, sufficient to make it a very terrible affair.
They shot the planter dressed as he was taken. When he had fallen, numbers of the blacks rushed up, and having stripped him, they threw his body, after inflicting numberless wounds on it, over the precipice. As his clothes had been injured by the bullets, they proceeded to strip the next person of his garments, with the exception of his trousers and shoes, which they allowed him to retain—the latter, at all events, being of very little use to them. He was one of the overseers, a fierce, dark, stern man. He looked as if he was incapable of experiencing any of the softer sympathies of our nature. He was standing close to me while the planter was being shot, and not one of us knew who would next be selected for execution. When the men who had taken out the overseer seized hold of him, he turned deadly pale, and shrieked out for mercy.
“Don’t kill me! don’t kill me!” he exclaimed. “I am not fit to die. I cannot go as I am into another world. Oh, let me live! let me live! I will toil for you; I will build your cottages; I will till your fields. Kind Africans! hear me: if I have injured anyone, I will repay him an hundred-fold. I’ll do anything you require of me; but don’t, oh, don’t kill me!”
The negro chief smiled at him scornfully, and the others who surrounded him grinned horribly in his face. “Hi! hi! you mark my back with hot iron,” said one, gripping him by the shoulder; “you take out de mark?”
“You kill my piccaninni!” cried another in a hissing tone in his ear. “You gib him back, eh? You make him smile in me face ’gain, eh?”
“You take away me young wife!” exclaimed another, in a hoarse voice, looking him in the face. “Where she gone to now, eh? You give her back good and fond as she once was—no! You repay a hundred-fold!—you undo the harm you have done!”