‘He is a sneaking d——­l,’ said the Colonel; ’but he’s very valuable to me.  I never had an overseer who got so much work out of the hands.’

‘Is he cruel to them?’

’Yes, I reckon he is; but a nigger is like a dog,—­you must flog him to make him like you.’

‘I judge your niggers haven’t been flogged into liking Moye,’ I replied.

‘Why, have you heard any of them speak of him?’

’Yes; though, of course, I’ve made no effort to draw gossip from them.  I had to hear.’

’O yes; I know; there’s no end to their gabble; niggers will talk.  But what have you heard?’

’That Moye is to blame in this affair of Sam, and that you don’t know the whole story.’

‘What is the whole story?’ asked the Colonel, stopping short in the road; ‘tell me before I see Sam.’

I then told him what Jim had recounted to me.  He heard me through attentively, then laughingly exclaimed,—­

’Is that all!  Lord bless you; he didn’t seduce her.  There’s no seducing these women; with them it’s a thing of course.  It was Sam’s d——­ high blood that made the trouble.  His father was the proudest man in Virginia, and Sam is as like him as a nigger can be like a white man.’

’No matter what the blood is, it seems to me such an injury justifies revenge.’

’Pshaw, my good fellow, you don’t know these people.  I’ll stake my plantation against a glass of whisky there’s not a virtuous woman with a drop of black blood in her veins in all South Carolina.  They prefer the white men; their husbands know it, and take it as a matter of course.’

We had here reached the negro cabin.  It was one of the more remote of the collection, and stood deep in the woods, an enormous pine growing up directly beside the doorway.  In all respects it was like the other huts on the plantation.  A bright fire lit up its interior, and through the crevices in the logs we saw, as we approached, a scene that made us pause involuntarily, when within a few rods of the house.  The mulatto man, whose clothes were torn and smeared with swamp mud, stood near the fire.  On a small pine table near him lay a large carving-knife, which glittered in the blaze, as if recently sharpened.  His wife was seated on the side of the low bed at his back, weeping.  She was two or three shades lighter than the man, and had the peculiar brown, kinky hair, straight, flat nose, and speckled, gray eyes which mark the metif.  Tottling on the floor at the feet of the man, and caressing his knees, was a child of perhaps two years.

As we neared the house, we heard the voice of the Overseer issuing from the doorway on the other side of the pine-tree.

‘Come out, ye black rascal.’

‘Come in, you wite hound, ef you dar,’ responded the negro, laying his hand on the carving-knife.

‘Come out, I till ye; I sha’n’t ax ye agin.’

‘I’ll hab nuffin’ to do wid you.  G’way and send your massa har,’ replied the mulatto man, turning his face away with a lordly, contemptuous gesture, that spoke him a true descendant of Pocahontas.  This movement exposed his left side to the doorway, outside of which, hidden from us by the tree, stood the Overseer.