"I own, I own," he stammered forth, a picture of mingled fear and contrition, "you've allus used me well, Mr. Hapgood,--but," he hastened to add, with a scared glance at Silas, "I hate your principles!" "Look here, Dan Pepperill!" remarked Mr. Ropes, with grim significance, "you better shet your yaup, and be a bringin' that ar kittle!" Dan groaned, and departed. Penn smiled bitterly. "I have always used him well; and this is the return I get!" He thought of another evening, but little more than a week since, when, passing by this very path, he heard a deeper groan than that which the wretch had just uttered. He turned aside into the edge of the woods, and there beheld an object to excite at once his laughter and compassion. What he saw was this. Dan Pepperill, astride a rail; his hands tied together above it, and his feet similarly bound beneath. The rail had been taken from a fence a mile away, and he had been carried all that distance on the shoulders of some of these very men. They had taken turns with him, and when, tired at last, had placed the rail in the crotches of two convenient saplings, and there left him. The crotch in front was considerably higher than that behind, which circumstance gave him the appearance of clinging to the back of an animal in the act of rearing frightfully, and exposed a delicate part of his apparel that had been sadly rent by contact with splinters. And there the wretch was clinging and groaning when Penn came up. "For the love of the Lord!" said Dan, "take me down!" "Why, what is the matter? How came you here?" "I'm a dead man; that's the matter! I've been wipped to death, and then rode on a rail; that's the way I come here!" "Whipped! what for?" said Penn, losing no time in cutting the sufferer's bonds. "Ye see," said Dan, when taken down and laid upon the ground, "the patrolmen found Combs's boy Pete out t'other night without a pass, and took him and tied him to a tree, and licked him." The "boy Pete" was a negro man upwards of fifty years old, owned by the said Combs. "Wal, ye see, jest cause I found him, and took him home with me, and washed his back fur him, and bound cotton on to it, and kep' him over night, and gin him a good breakfast, and a drink o' suthin' strong in the morning, and then went home with him, and talked with his master so'st he wouldn't git another licking,--just for that, Sile Ropes and his gang took me and served me wus'n ever they served him!" And the broken-spirited man cried like a child at the recollection of his injuries.