The Master of the plantation was a firm supporter of the Confederate President and had committed to send as much food as he could to the Southern army. Things were going well at first, until the Yankees began attacking the Master’s supply lines. The Master suspected a traitor among his slaves, and soon discovered that the Yankee spy was a slave-woman named Big Liz. She was a behemoth of a girl who could pick up two full-grown pigs, one under each arm, and cart them over to the slaughterhouse without assistance. If he confronted her directly and she fought back, she would take him to pieces.

So the Master came up with a different plan to rid himself of the spy. He approached the giant girl and asked her to assist him with a special task. He told her that President Jefferson Davis had entrusted him with a large chest full of gold. To keep it out of Yankee hands, he wanted to bury the chest where it would never be found. The girl’s eyes gleamed when she heard this false report. The Master knew she was already planning to betray the existence of the chest to the Yankees.

The Master made Big Liz carry the heavy trunk several miles out into the swamp land and asked her to dig a deep hole for the trunk. He sat at his leisure while she worked and strained for hours against the muddy ground, which kept oozing back into the hole. When the slave girl was completely exhausted, the Master decreed the hole to be large enough for his war chest. Wearily, Big Liz dropped the shovel and pulled the heavy chest down until it lay at her feet. Then she started to climb out of the deep hole. But the Master barred her way, and Big Liz gazed up at him in sudden fear as he loomed over her. “Traitor!Yankee spy!” The Master hissed. “There is only one path open to a traitor.”

The Master swung his sword at her, and the sharp edge of the blade cut cleaning through the slave girl’s neck. Her head went rolling away into the tall grass as her body toppled across the chest. The Master heaped dirt over the chest and the body of slave girl who had betrayed him. Briefly, he considered finding her head and burying it in the pit with her body, but it was too dark to go wandering in the dangerous marshland, and he knew that scavengers would make short work of the head when they found it.