Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/376

 sought hospitality for the night at the house of a planter, one of the most respectable men, as I was afterwards told, in all that vicinity, but who, instead of putting himself forward, as was expected of him, to take the lead in unravelling the plot and punishing its authors, had chosen to remain quietly at home.

He had great doubts, I found, whether there was, in fact, any plot, and whether the whole thing was not a chimera of the imagination. Alarms of negro plots, founded on alleged overheard conversations, and throwing every body, especially the women and children, into the most horrible panics, were as much epidemics, he told me, all through the south, as the autumn bilious fevers. He was too much accustomed to those alarms, which had always, so far as he knew, ended in smoke, or the hanging of a few negroes on suspicion, to pay much attention to them. Yet he admitted that the increasing number, at the south, of desperate and uneasy white men, without property or the means to acquire any, might be likely, as the present resource failed of helping one's self to a plantation by squatting on government lands, to lead hereafter to frightful commotions.

We were quietly discussing this subject over a cup of tea, when two or three truculent looking white men rode up to the house; and one of them, dismounting, handed a dirty and rumpled piece of paper to my host.

As he read it, his brows began to lower. It was, in fact, a summons or requisition from the committee of vigilance for his speedy personal appearance before them, bringing with him, also, the stranger — meaning me — who had been traced to his house.

Upon his inquiring of the bearer what the committee of vigilance wanted of him, the answer was, that his not taking any part in the proceedings had been thought very strange, and that some of the confessing prisoners had stated something by which he was implicated.

To all this he coolly replied, that he was ready