The Western Double by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2017-01-24T14:09:05+00:00

Chapter

Twenty-Three

I don’t know why I was so keen to enter that hunt that was beating the marshes, but somehow I felt that I must have action, of any kind whatever, to free me from the deathlike gloom at Granville House. And besides, I had a vague idea that public service might reinstate the name of Charles Granville.

At any rate, I rode out by myself, armed with a description of the missing Negro. He was owned by Ogden, the cotton planter, a brutal man who employed a brutal set of slaves, and this fellow was one of the ugliest of the lot. He had been six months on the place, and already he had been flogged twice for resisting the overseer—once flogged almost to death!

The case was clear enough. So before I mounted, I looked to the condition of the rifle I carried, and saw to a pair of Colts, but I spent my half day of search in vain, until, turning back toward home, I came across a number of searchers luckier than I had been.

There were half a dozen riders crossing a field before me, and one of them led behind him like a beast a Negro with a rope tied around his neck, and his hands fastened behind his back.

It was Ogden’s Luke, of course.

I jumped Palomides across the next fence and came up with them at once, and there was young Channing Lipton at the head of the riders. The others were five of his Negroes, all armed to the teeth. Behind the last of them stumbled Luke, at the end of the rope, a dreadful picture of a man.

He was a huge-thewed giant, and had evidently passed through hell. The mud of the marshes was plastered over him and matted in his hair, and his clothes were torn to ribbons. And as he walked along I could not help feeling that tragedy ennobles those who suffer by it, for from his raised, set face not a murmur of complaint or appeal came.

I raised my hat to Channing Lipton. He looked me fairly in the face and passed on, with his Negroes sneering openly at me. For when one of the rulers of the land fell, he was lower than the lowest of the blacks. I felt that—I had been made to feel it before by the subdued hate and disgust in the faces of the slaves on the colonel’s place. But I had endured so many rebuffs of this sort in the past week that I could endure this new one without changing countenance.

And then, just as they were passing, Luke stumbled, pitched on his face, and was dragged a few yards by the neck.

“Stop!” I thundered.

They made no attempt to pause, and the brute, who had the rope noosed over the horn of his saddle, merely turned and grinned at the captive.

I leaped from Palomides’ back and reached big Luke in an instant. A slash of my Bowie knife cut the rope, and in another moment I had loosened the noose around his throat.

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