"Stop! Gentlemen, this is too high-handed. Do you reckon I'll let you
run down those four innocent creatures with hounds? I _swear_ you
shan't do it, sirs."

"See here," said the one still with me, "come on. We'll show you the
very spots where those innocents left the road one by one, and if you
don't say they've used every trick known to a nigger to kill their
trail, we'll just quit and go home. Does that suit you?"

"Not by a long chalk!" I retorted as I moved with him up the pike.
"Those poor simpletons--alone in a strange land, maybe without a pass,
at any moment liable to meet a patrol--how easy for them to make the
fatal mistake of leaving the road and hiding their tracks!"

"All right, come ahead, you'll see fair play."

We passed the scene of the breakdown and then the house to which the
coach had been drawn. I saw the coach in a stable door. By and by a
turn in the pike revealed the other clerk and a tall, slim horseman
just dismounting among four lop-eared, black-and-brown dogs coupled two
and two by light steel breast-yokes. With a heavy whip and without a
frown this man gave one of them a quick cut over the face as the brute
ventured to lift a voice as hollow and melodious as a bell.

"He's a puppy I'm breaking in," said the man. "Now here, you see"--he
pointed to the middle of the road--"is where you, sir, met up with the
madam and her niggers, and given her yo' hoss and taken her span.
Here's the tracks o' the span, you takin' 'em back; you can see they're
the same as these comin' this way. T'other critter's tracks I don't