THE WATCHER Part One

The leather whip stripped another layer of flesh away with each sickening slap across the African's back. Rivulets of blood soaked the coarse shirt that hung in tatters around his waist. His teeth clenched and he looked heavenward in anticipaton of the next stinging blow. When it came his body tensed momentarily, his eyes rolled back in his head and his muscular frame slumped against the post; the ropes cut into his wrists as he hung limply from the crossbar above. Blood continued to run from his flayed back, mixed with the sweat already there, while the man with the whip accepted congratulations from the assembled witnesses. Finally, he was cut loose and allowed to fall heavily to the bloodsoaked ground.
"Thet nigger'll never run agin'," declared Tom Colter, boss of the plantation. "Thet there whip damn sure speaks their language!"
"My whip speaks louder'n any man and in ev'ry language on God's earth!" Henry Cheever, owner of the plantation and wielder of the whip boasted with a proud grin as he reflected on the many poor souls who'd felt its lash. Henry Cheever knew what it was to be hunted down as he'd hunted runaway slaves. He'd come from his native Virginia twelve years earlier, barely dodging the hangman's noose by no more than the width of a whisker sprouted on his stern chin. Hardly a day went by when he wasn't reminded of the man he'd killed in a fight over a woman, a woman whose name he never knew and whose face was as cold and dead in his memory as the man he'd laid in his grave.
"Throw him in the cell," he barked to a pair of hired hands. "We'll send this one south t'morrow mornin' with the others."

Part Two
The country was embroiled in a brutalizing civil war. Slavery, the lifeblood of the south, was in danger of being denied the confederacy by unseen bureaucrats in Washington. To the confederates slavery wasn't a civil or human rights issue, it was an economic issue. Without it there wouldn't be enough hands to work the fields, without hands many of the large plantations would fail; loyal southerners Henry Cheever and Tom Colter sought to keep them supplied.
Henry and Tom were reclaimers, men who kidnapped freed or runaway slaves from neighboring free states like Illinois and Kansas and brought them through a reverse underground railroad to the Cheever farm. It was a way station on a distribution network that returned them to slave states further south. The house had been specially built for the traffic in slaves. Its third floor was entirely taken over with small cells, each containing two bunks. At ground level the house was divided through its heart by a driveway, slaves could be brought into it without ever being seen. Acres of corn surrounded the house, keeping strangers at a distance and providing a steadier income than slave trafficking.
...to be continued...