Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/222

 of murderers, but with that lofty feeling of manhood vindicated, and tyranny visited with a just retribution, which animated the soul of the Israelitish hero whilst he fled for refuge into the country of the Midianites; and which burned in the bosoms of Wallace and of Tell, as they pursued their midnight flight among the friendly cliffs and freedom-breathing summits of their native mountains.

There were no mountains to receive and shelter us. But still we fled through the swamps and barrens of Carolina, resolved to put, as soon as possible, some good miles between us and the neighborhood of Loosahachee. It was more than twenty-four hours since we had tasted food; yet such was the excitement of our minds that we did not faint, and were hardly sensible of weakness or fatigue.

We kept a northwesterly direction, steering our course by the stars, and we must have made a good distance; for we did not once stop to rest, but pushed forward at a very rapid pace all night. Our way lay through the open "pineywoods," through which we could travel almost as fast as on a road. Sometimes a swamp or the appearances of a plantation, would compel us to deviate from our track, but as soon as we could, we resumed our original direction.

The darkness of the night, which for the last hour or two that it lasted, had been increased by a foggy mist, was just beginning to yield to the first indistinct grey dawn of the morning. We were passing along a little depression in the level of the pine barrens, now dry, but in the wet season, probably the bed of a temporary stream, looking for a place in which to conceal ourselves, — when we suddenly came upon a man, lying, as it seemed, asleep in the midst of a clump of bushes, with his head resting on a bag of corn. We recognized him at once. He was a slave belonging to a plantation next adjoining Loosahachee, with whom we had had some slight acquaintance, but who, as we were informed, had been a runaway, for some two or three months past. Thomas shook him by the shoulder, and he wakened in a terrible fright. We told him not to be alarmed, for we were runaways like himself, and very much in need of his assistance, being half dead with hunger, and in a country with which we were totally