"
"He blowed the gab," said Joe Johnson, "but it won't serve him."
"Zeke," cried the woman, "it's no use. You go to Georgey with the next
gang--you an' the white nigger thar."
The man threw himself upon the floor and moaned and prayed, as the
lamplight disappeared and the hatchway slid echoingly over the stairs,
and the lower bolts were drawn. As he lay there in horror and amid
contempt, a voice arrested his ears near by, singing, with musical and
easy spirit, so low that it seemed a hymn, from the roads and fields far
down beneath:
"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
In dis weak, helpless soul."
The man listened with awe and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune,
and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a
treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy
Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor
most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and
Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's
island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon
his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was
none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise
of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for
her.
"Poor Mary!" Phoebus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn
cadence.
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