“So master finds I’d got home, and he sends one of the children out arter me; and in I goes, and finds him on his bed yit. He speaks, ‘You got home, have you?’ ‘Yis, Sir; and how does master do?’ ‘Oh! I’m _almost dead_, Peter;’ and he spoke as mild as _you_ do. And I says, ‘I’m dreadful sorry for you;’ and I _lied, tu_. So I pitied him, and pretended to feel bad, and cry. And he says, ‘You must be a good boy, and take good care of the stock, till I gets well.’ And so out I goes to the barn, and sung, and danced, and felt as tickled as a boy with a new whistle, to think master had got a good bruisin’ as well as myself, and I’d got on my taps first.
“Well, for six months he was a kind of a decent man; he’d speak kind’a pleasant—for he was so ‘fraid of Abers, that he darn’t do any other way.
“Next winter followin’, I was in the barn thrashin’; and, as I stood with my back to the south door, a litter of leetle white pigs comes along, and goes to eatin’ the karnels of wheat that fell over master’s barn door sill; and I was kind’a pleased to see sich leetle fellers, they always seemed so kind’a _funny_; and the fust thing I knew, he struck me over the head with one of these ’ere old-fashioned pitchforks, and I fell into the straw jist like a pluck in a pail of water. I gathers as quick as I could, arter I found out I was down, and he stood, with a fork in his hand, and swore if I stirred, he’d knock me down, and pin me to the floor.
“I run out of the big door, and he arter me, with the fork in his hand; and he run me into the snow, where ’twas deep, and got me to the fence, where I was up to my middle in snow, and couldn’t move; and he was a goin’ to thrust arter me, and I hollers, and says, ‘Master, _don’t_ stick that into me.’ ‘I _will_, you black devil.’ I see there was no hope for me; and I reaches out, and got hold of a stake, and as I took hold on it, as ’twas so ordered, _it come out_; and, as he made a plunge arter _me_, I struck arter him with this stake, and hit him right across the _small of his back_; and the way I did it warn’t slow; and he fell into the snow like a dead man; and he lay there, and didn’t stir, only one of his feet _quivered_; and I began to grow scart, for fear he was dyin’; and I was tempted to run into the barn, and dash my head agin’ a post, and dash my brains out; and the longer I stood there, the worse I felt, for I knew for murder a body must be hung.