Murrell looked from Tad to the huge negro and back at Tad again. He seemed to relish the situation. “This,” he explained to the boy, “is Congo, my bodyguard. He was the son of a great African chief, and when they brought him off the slave ship he killed four men. They tortured him so that he will never hear or speak again. But I rode by at the right moment and saved him from death. At a sign from me he would pick you up now and tear you into forty pieces.” The giant black seemed to sense what his master was saying, for he flexed his mighty fingers, and his sides shook with a great, silent laugh. Tad, looking into that cavernous mouth, saw that there was no tongue back of the gleaming white teeth, and the negro’s ears had been cropped and mutilated in horrible fashion. Murrell gestured toward the house and led the way to the steps, and Congo picked the boy up as easily as if he had been a baby. Through the doorway and along a narrow hall he carried him, and then at another signal from Murrell, he climbed with him up a flight of steep, rickety stairs. Opening a door at the top, he flung his burden down, and stood awaiting the further commands of his master. Murrell nodded. When the negro had gone out, he stooped and dragged Tad a few feet into a shadowy corner. Here he picked up a heavy iron fetter attached to a three-foot chain, and clasped it around one of the boy’s ankles. With a brass key taken from his pocket, he secured its ponderous lock. “That and our hospitality,” he chuckled, “ought to be plenty to keep you here. I’ll let you have the use o’ yo’ hands to keep the fleas from bein’ too familiar.” So saying, he whipped out a clasp knife and cut the cords that had bound Tad’s wrists and ankles. And with an exaggerated bow he went out, closing the door after him. When the sound of his footsteps had died away at the bottom of the stairs, Tad raised himself to a sitting posture and looked about at his prison. In what he saw there was nothing to lighten the gloom of his desperate situation. The room was a long, narrow garret, lighted only by one window, at the farther end. Yellow, mildewed plaster was dropping off the walls in flakes. The floor was a mass of filth. Around him in the corner where he sat were dirt and grease and foul-smelling rags, and the whole place had a close, sickly odor that nauseated him. But Tad was not one to give up easily. He had a stubborn sort of courage that rose to occasions of this kind. And when he had conquered his first feeling of illness, he set himself to test every possible avenue of escape.