Page:The Partisan (revised).djvu/63

 "Well, as I tell you, the old man and his two boys came full tilt to the house, and 'twas a God's mercy they came in time, for the doings of the dragoon was too rediculous for any decent body to put up with, and the old colt couldn't stand it no how; so, as I tell you, he put it to him in short order. He first gave him a back-handed wipe, which flattened him, I tell you; and when the sodger tried to get up, he put it to him again so that it was easier for him to lie down than to stand up; and lie down he did, without a word, till the other dragoons tuk him up. They came a few minutes after, and the old man and the youngest boy, Lance, had a narrow chance and a smart run for it. They heard the troops coming down the lane, and they took to the bush. The sodgers tried hard to catch them, but it aint easy to hook a Goose-Creeker when he's on trail for the swamp, and splashing after the hogs along a tussock. So they got safe into the Cypress, and the dragoons had nothing better to do than go back to the house. Well, they made Frampton's old woman stand all sorts of treatment, and that too bad to find names for. They beat her too, and she as heavy as she could go. Well, then, she died night afore last, as might be expected; and now the wonder is, what's become of her body. They laid her out; and the old granny that watched her only went into the kitchen for a little while, and when she came back the body was gone. She looked out of the window, and sure enough she sees a man going over the rail with a bundle all in white on his shoulder. And the man looked, so she swears, for all the world like old Frampton himself. Nobody knows anything more about it; and what I heard, is jist now what I tell you."

The man had narrated truly what he had heard; and what, in reality, with little exaggeration, was the truth. The company had listened to one of those stories of brutality, which&mdash;in the fierce civil warfare of the South, when neighbours were arrayed against one another, and when, on one side, negroes and Indians formed allies, contributing, by their lighter sense of humanity, additional forms of terror to the sanguinary warfare pursued at that period&mdash;were of almost daily occurrence. Huck, the infamous tory captain, of whom we have already obtained a slight glimpse in the progress of our narrative, was himself a character well fitted, by his habitual