The negro chief smiled at him scornfully, and the others who surrounded him grinned horribly in his face. "Hi! hi! you mark my back with hot iron," said one, gripping him by the shoulder; "you take out de mark?" "You kill my piccaninni!" cried another in a hissing tone in his ear. "You gib him back, eh? You make him smile in me face 'gain, eh?" "You take away me young wife!" exclaimed another, in a hoarse voice, looking him in the face. "Where she gone to now, eh? You give her back good and fond as she once was--no! You repay a hundred-fold!--you undo the harm you have done!" "Wretched man! go meet the Judge whose laws you have outraged; go encounter the reproachful spirits of those who, in life, you have irretrievably injured! You are a blot on the world; you must be put out of it. You must stand before your Almighty Judge, your God. He is a God of mercy to those who have shown mercy. But have you shown it? No! Still you must die!" The latter expressions were, of course, not uttered by the negroes, but something very similar was said; and amid the shouts and execrations of the multitude, the wretched man was dragged out, and being shot down, a hundred weapons were plunged in his yet warm and writhing body ere he was thrown over the cliff to be food for the fowls of the air, which, in spite of the firing, had already settled on the body of the planter, once his superior, now his wretched equal. The same scene was enacted with several others. In vain they pleaded for life, in vain they offered rewards--large bribes, freedom to some, the means of returning to Africa to others who had been brought over. The negroes laughed all offers to scorn. No promises were believed: too often had they been made and broken; too exquisitely cruel and barbarous had been the punishments inflicted on prisoners taken in former outbreaks, to allow them to lose the gratification of their present revenge.