Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/316

 notice a company of near a hundred men had been collected, planters, overseers, loafers, poor whites, with four or five professional slave catchers, and several packs of hounds, armed to the teeth, and prepared to make a search of the neighboring swamps, in which it was customary for the runaways to take refuge, lying hid by day, and coming out by night to supply themselves by killing cattle and otherwise, and to communicate with their wives and friends who remained behind. The season indeed was very favorable to this operation, an uncommonly long drought having dried up the swamps to a considerable extent, and made them much more accessible than usual.

The entire company had been accordingly divided into five or six divisions, each to carry on operations by itself, and each provided with its pack of dogs, that into whose company I had fallen — I speak here not so much of the dogs as of the men — being one of them. What had been the success of the other parties my informant could not tell. What I saw before me indicated, in a general way, the mixed fortune which his party had encountered.

It had been appointed to them as their duty to search a swamp of no great extent, but very inaccessible on account of the unusual depth of the mud and water, in many places over a man's head, in the centre of which was a small island of firm land, believed to be a favorite lurking-place of Wild Tom's, who was supposed to know better than any body else the most convenient approaches to it.

Within half a mile from the swamp the dogs had started the lighter colored of the two prisoners, upon whom they came suddenly as he Jay concealed in the long grass, hoping to escape observation. As the party were close by, the dogs were prevented from tearing him, and he was made prisoner without trouble. The mud on his feet and legs, and the wetness of the scanty fragments of clothing that he wore, afforded pretty strong indications that he had lately come from the swamp island, which it was the object