Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/374

 of one of the victims. It was in vain that she besought permission to take down and to bury the body of her husband. This was denied, with brutal threats that any person who dared to cut them down till they had hung there twenty-four hours, by way of example, should be made to share their fate. Such, indeed, was the passionate fury of the multitude, that the poor woman, in alarm for her own life, fled to the river bank, and, placing her two children in a skiff, entered herself, and pushed off, thinking this a safer course than to remain longer at Vicksburg.

After the tumult had subsided a little, I showed the bar-keeper the direction of the letter of introduction I had brought, and inquired if he knew such a person.

No sooner had he read the name than his face assumed an expression of horror and alarm. "Do you know that person?" he eagerly inquired.

I told him I did not. This was my first visit to this part of the country. The letter had been given me by a gentleman whom I had met at Augusta.

"Pray don't mention the name," he replied; "say nothing of it to any body. This letter is addressed to one of the persons whom you saw hung as you came into the town. He kept a roulette table, no doubt, and understood a thing or two; but was a generous hearted soul for all that; and every way quite as much a gentleman as half those concerned in hanging him. Should you mention his name, you might yourself be seized as one of the gang, and hung with the rest."

Congratulating myself on this lucky escape, I then ventured to inquire of the bar-keeper if he knew a planter in that vicinity of the name of Thomas.

There had been, he told me, a planter of that name, — and from the account he gave of him, I was satisfied it was the one of whom I was in search, — who lived formerly a few miles off; but within two or three years past he had moved to a distance of some fifty miles, in Madison county, up the Big Black,