He swore an oath, half blasphemous, half blackguard, and the captain murmured, with a lisp:

"The white man is the only witness. Make sure of him!"

Irons were produced, and the captain speedily fastened Phoebus's hands in a clevis, and hobbled his feet, and placed him, without brutality, in the pen, and, further, chained him there to a ring in the joist below. As the door was closed and bolted, a voice from the darkness of the pen cried out:

"Aunt Patty, let me out: I saved the captain's life; I took the white man's knife. I'll serve you faithfully if you only let me go."

"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.

The wretched man listened and trembled.

"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his inflection.

The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeballs turned in torment.

"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly, in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of the quiet hymn again:

"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made In dis weak, helpless soul, Till mercy, wid its mighty aid De-scen to make me whole; Yes, Lord! De-scen to make me whole."

The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into a place between two of the cypress shingles in the roof, where he had hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as superstitious passions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.