He stood for an instant, panting, with a wild exultation pouring like fire through his veins. Then snatching the heavy bowie-knife from the floor, he sprang from the room, and leaped on the veranda just as the overseer, who had come up again from the fields, had set one foot on the steps to ascend. Flying against him full shock, he threw him backward clear and clean off his feet, and saw his head bounce with a terrific concussion on the grass as he sped on over the stunned body. He did not pause, nor look behind, but flew with the rush of a race-horse for the swamp. The light wind had risen, and the grain in the fields and the scattered trees on either side, and in the skirting woods beyond, and all the lurking shadows, waved, and tossed, and lifted under the sultry vault, as he sped his desperate course, while the hot landscape rushed to meet him, and ran whirling by, closing around and behind him, and seeming to follow as he flew. Across the lawn, its grass and wildflowers sliding dizzily beneath him—up with a flying leap across the fence, which vanished below him—and down with a light shock on the red plantation marl which rose to meet him, and reeled from under him as he bounded on. Away, with frantic speed, over rows of cotton-plants, bruised beneath his feet, and gliding from under him—away, with a wilder leap, as the loud shouts of the slaves in full chorus struck his ear, and he saw them all, men and women, with open mouths and upthrown arms, stand with the mules and ploughs in the field on one side, and vanish from his flying glimpse as he fled by. Away, with every nerve and sinew desperately strung—with his pained heart knocking against his side—with his held breath bursting from him in short gasps—with the sweat reeking and pouring down his body, and dropping in big drops from his face, to be caught upon his clothes in his speed—with the bright knife, as his last refuge, clutched in his grasp—with the one thought of Liberty or Death burning in the whirl of his brain. Past the plantation now, his feet thudding heavily on a hard, black soil—on, with the swarming hum of innumerable insects, murmurously swirling by—on, with the light and rapid current of the hot south wind cool on the pain and fervor of his face, and swiftly purring in his ears—on, over rushing grass and flowers, and stunted shrubs and butts of trees—up again with a furious leap over a fence that sinks, and down again with a heavy thump on ground that rises—on and away at headlong speed over a field of monstrous stumps, scattering the light chips as he flies—in now with a bound among the bright-green leaves of a thick palmetto bottom, and on with a rush through the swish, swish, swish of their loud and angry rustle, as he crashes forward to the still gleam of the bayou. Now his feet swash heavily on a grassy turf that yields like sponge, and water fills his shoes at every bound. Now the water deepens, and he sinks above his ankles or midway to his knees, as he splashes