Page:Memorials of a Southern Planter.djvu/47

 Rh The man was much moved, and shed tears. The sheriff lent him his own horse to ride home. On the appointed day he was at the court-house with the hundred dollars in his hand. His gratitude to the man who had trusted him, one who had been an outlaw for years, made a changed man of him. He was ever after a law-abiding citizen, and was Thomas's stanch friend as long as he lived.

Crusoe passed away years ago, but his son, himself an aged man now, loves to tell the story of Mr. Dabney's trust of his father. This son asked Mr. James Dabney of the Exchange if he was a relative of the former sheriff, and on hearing that they were cousins, expressed his own gratitude and his father's for the confidence placed in him in the time of trouble. The fifty odd years that have passed since that time seem not to have obliterated it from the memory of the Crusoe family.

At the time when the negro rising known as the Southhampton insurrection was threatened, Thomas received from Governor Floyd a commission of colonel of militia. He and his men kept their horses saddled and bridled in the stable every night for three weeks, ready for any alarm or emergency. He was an accomplished horseman, and sat his mettlesome, blooded stallion like a part of himself A boy in the neighborhood, whom his father asked if he would like to go to the court-house to see Colonel Dabney's soldiers drill, said in reply that he would rather see Colonel Dabney on his horse at the head of his regiment than all the soldiers. This boy, now a gray-headed man in Baltimore, delights yet in talking of those days. "When the drum and the fife struck up," he says, "that was the time that we boys had the fun Colonel Dabney's horse sprang into the air and seemed hardly to touch the ground, and we wondered how he kept his seat."

On the night when it was understood that the negro rising was to take place he called his own negroes up, and put his wife under their charge, as his duty called him away from her. His charge to them was that not