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Updated: May 1, 2025
After an interval, Tim Shearer, Radway and Kerlie came out again. "Where's the boss?" asked Shearer. "I don't know, Tim," replied Wallace seriously. "I've looked everywhere. He's gone. He must have been all cut up. I think he went out in the woods to get over it. I am not worrying. Harry has lots of sense. He'll come in about dark." "Sure!" said Tim. "How about the boy's stakes?" queried Radway.
"I will tell my father what you have said to me, and ask him to speak to you on the subject, and he will probably examine Rob Kerlie. It will surely be wise to be on our guard, even should the negroes not really be meditating mischief. I confess that what you have told me has made me somewhat anxious; this hot evening is not calculated to rise one's spirits.
He distinguished the broad, square shoulders of Scotty Parsons, Jack Hyland, Kerlie, Bryan Moloney; Ellis grinned at him from the press; Billy Camp, the fat and shiny drive cook; Mason, the foreman of the mill; over beyond howled Solly, the tug captain, Rollway Charley, Shorty, the chore-boy; everywhere were features that he knew.
When half-way through the swamp, Red Jacket stopped, removed his coat, ripped the lining from it, and began to fashion a rude mask. "Just as well they don't recognize us," said he. "Somebody in town will give us away," suggested Shorty, the chore-boy. "No, they won't; they're all here," assured Kerlie. It was true.
Yesterday, one of our assistant overseers, a mulatto, Bob Kerlie by name, to whom I had rendered some service, told me that he had heard one was to take place on some wild ground between this and the next estate; and I persuaded him to act as my guide to the place. He told me that I must be careful what I said or did, as the negroes were in a very curious humour and might easily be offended.
It stood under a vast cotton-tree, on an open space near the bank of the river which you see running into the ocean to the westward of this. As we went along Kerlie told me that the chief performer was a big negro, Cudjoe, reputed to be a powerful Obeah man; that is, a necromancer, or what the North American Indians would call a medicine-man.
Here were the best of the Fighting Forty, men with a reputation as "white-water birlers" men afraid of nothing. Every morning the crews were divided into two sections under Kerlie and Jack Hyland. Each crew had charge of one side of the river, with the task of cleaning it thoroughly of all stranded and entangled logs. Scotty Parsons exercised a general supervisory eye over both crews.
Its members were invariably recruited from one of the other four camps; never from applicants who had not been in Thorpe's employ. A raw man was sent to Scotty, or Jack Hyland, or Radway, or Kerlie. There he was given a job, if he happened to suit, and men were needed.
Then calling together some ten or twelve of his own followers, Boyd, Kerlie, Seton, and others, to whom the dust of the most desperate battle was like the breath of life, he commanded them to arm themselves, and lie flat upon the deck, so as to be out of sight.
"Kerlie," went on Thorpe, "your crew can break rollways with the rest until we get the river fairly filled, and then you can move on down stream as fast as you are needed. Scotty, you will have the rear. Tim and I will boss the river." At once the signal was given to Ellis, the dam watcher. Ellis and his assistants thereupon began to pry with long iron bars at the ratchets of the heavy gates.
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