Then he exploded.

"I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would
so! I wish that...."

What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the
block of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed
by two negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He
was not ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl
had been unheard.

Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted
like a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and
betraying thing that in the circumstances it was possible for him to
do. Pitt groaned and stood still, leaning upon his spade.

"Hi, there! Stop!" bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and
added horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.

But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head.
It was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have
seen his face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was
quite sufficient to hang any man whom he thought would be better
dead.

Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the
two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It
was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations
since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him