So Dewitt roused his men, and they rode out after the Negro. They didn’t have to go more than a mile before they came into the African’s camp. There was no fire and the Negroes, maybe twelve, was lying on the bare ground with no cover, sleeping. Right in the middle of the clearing, his back against a huge rock, the black baby across his knees, sat the African. He had a cloth over his head and set up in front of him was a pile of stones, which he seemed to be a-mumbling at.

Dewitt Willson couldn’t figure out why no one’d warned the African, how come he’d been able to sneak up on him, and leaned down to the Negro and said: “Why aren’t there no guards? He knew I was right close by. Why aren’t there no guards?”

The Negro smiled up at him. “There was one guard. Me.”

“Why’d you do this? Why’d you turn on him?”

The Negro smiled again. “I’m an American; I’m no savage. And besides, a man’s got to follow where his pocket takes him, doesn’t he?”

Dewitt Willson nodded. Some folks said he almost turned around and went back to his own camp and wanted to forget all about catching his property this way and then come back in the morning when the African would be gone and chase him until he caught him fair and square, because it seems like after all those weeks of chasing the African through the woods, after all that time of following his trail and thinking maybe he’d get him this time and finding he didn’t any more have him than a dwarf has a chance of being a professional basketball player, after all the sweating and riding and bad food and hard sleeping, he’d come to respect this man, and I reckon he must-a been a little sad that when he finally caught up with his property it was because some fellow the African’d trusted would turncoat and lead the white men into camp. But the other men didn’t feel that way. They wanted the African any way they could get him because he’d been making fools of them and they knew it and they wanted an end to that.