Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/78

 She threw it down, as if the touch had stung her; and looking him full in the face, the tears, all the while, streaming from her eyes, she said in a tone firm, but full of entreaty, "Master, he is my husband!"

That word husband, seemed to kindle colonel Moore into a new fury, which totally destroyed his self-command. He struck Cassy to the ground with his fists, trampled on her with his feet, and snatching.up the whip which she had thrown down, he laid it upon me with such violence, that the lash penetrated my flesh at every blow, and the blood ran trickling down my legs and stood in little puddles at my feet. The torture was too great for human endurance; I screamed with agony. "Pshaw," said my executioner, "his noise will disturb the House;" — and drawing a handkerchief from his pocket, he thrust it into my mouth, and rammed it down my throat with the butt-end of his whiphandle. Having thus effectually gagged me, he renewed his lashes. How long they were continued I do not know; a cloud began to swim before my eyes; my head grew dizzy and confused; and a fortunate fainting-fit soon put me beyond the reach of torture.





I recovered my senses, I found myself stretched upon a wretched pallet, which lay upon the floor, in one corner of a little, old, and ruinous hovel. I was very weak and hardly able to move; and I afterwards learned that I had just passed through the paroxysm of a fever. A deaf old woman, too much superannuated to be fit for any thing but a nurse, was my only companion. I recognized the old lady, and forgetting that she could not hear me, I put her a thousand questions in a breath, I dreaded, yet I wished to learn the fate of poor Cassy; and it was to her that most of my questions related. But to all my inquiries the old woman returned no answer. I might scream myself deaf, she said, and she could not hear a word. Besides, she told me, I was too sick and weak to talk.; 