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that it was the sound of horses moving slowly down the road toward me.
    Just in time, I dove into the bushes.
    I lay still, listening, shaking a little, wondering whether the approaching horsemen had seen me. I could see them now, dark, slowly moving shapes going in a direction that would eventually take them past me on toward the Weylin house. And if they saw me, they might take me along with them as their prisoner. Blacks here were assumed to be slaves unless they could prove they were free—unless they had their free papers. Paperless blacks were fair game for any white.
    And these riders were white. I could see that in the moonlight as they came near. Then they turned and headed into the woods just a few feet from me. I watched and waited, keeping absolutely still until they had all gone past. Eight white men out for a leisurely ride in the middle of the night. Eight white men going into the woods in the area where the Greenwood cabin was supposed to be.
    After a moment of indecision, I got up and followed them, moving carefully from tree to tree. I was both afraid of them and glad of their human presence. Dangerous as they could be to me, somehow, they did not seem as threatening as the dark shadowy woods with its strange sounds, its unknowns.
    As I had expected, the men led me to a small log cabin in a moonlit clearing in the woods. Rufus had told me I could reach the Greenwood cabin by way of the road, but he hadn’t told me the cabin sat back out of sight of the road. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe this was someone else’s cabin. I half hoped it was because if the people inside this cabin were black, they were almost certainly in for trouble.
    Four of the riders dismounted and went to hit and kick the door. When no one answered their pounding, two of them began trying to break it down. It looked like a heavy door—one more likely to break the men’s shoulders than it was to give. But apparently the latch used to keep it shut wasn’t heavy. There was a sound of splintering wood, and the door swung inward. The four men rushed in with it, and a moment later, three people were shoved, almost thrown out of the cabin. Two of them—a man and woman—were caught by the riders outside who had dismounted, apparently expecting them. The third, a little girl dressed in something long and light colored, was allowed to fall to the ground and scramble away, ignored by the men. She moved to within a few yards of where I lay in the bushes near the edge of the clearing.
    There was talk in the clearing now, and I began to distinguish words over the distance and through the unfamiliar accents.
    “No pass,” said one of the riders. “He sneaked off.”
    “No, Master,” pleaded one of those from the cabin—clearly a black man speaking to whites. “I had a pass. I had …”
    One of the whites hit him in the face. Two others held him, and he sagged between them. More talk.
    “If you had a pass, where is it?”
    “Don’t know. Must have dropped it coming here.”
    They hustled the man to a tree so close to me that I lay flat on the ground, stiff with fear. With just a little bad luck, one of the whites would spot me, or, in the darkness, fail to spot me and step on me.
    The man was forced to hug the tree, and his hands were tied to prevent him from letting go. The man was naked, apparently dragged from bed. I looked at the woman who still stood back beside the cabin and saw that she had managed to wrap herself in something. A blanket, perhaps. As I noticed it, one of the whites tore it from her. She said something in a voice so soft that all I caught was her tone of protest.
    “Shut your mouth!” said the man who had taken her blanket. He threw it on the ground. “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
    One of the other men joined in. “What do you think you’ve got that we haven’t seen before?”
    There was raucous laughter.
    “Seen more and better,” someone else added.
    There were obscenities, more laughter.
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