n within. "Maybe he's a mockin' his ole sweetheart. Oh, Van
Dorn, if I thought you could forget me I would kill you!"

Levin noticed the rapid temper and demoniac face of this not unengaging
lady as she spoke, her whole nature turning its course like a wheeling
bat, and from plausibility to an instant's jealousy, and then to a dark
tide of awful rage, took but a thought.

"_Que disparate! hala o he!_" Van Dorn lisped, sweetly, chucking the
hostess under the chin; "but I do love to see thee so, thou charmer of
my life. Never will I desert thee, Patty, whilst thou can suffer."

Her dark clouds slowly passed away as Levin turned from the place, but
her small head and abundant raven hair showed the blood troubled to the
roots, and the eyes, once rich with midnight depths, now glazing in the
course of time, like old window panes, by age, searched the bandit's
face with a strange fear:

"Van Dorn, time and pleasure cannot kill you: how well you look to-day.
I think you are a boy, to be ruined again every time you love me, you
blush so modestly. Where is that pot of color you paint your cheeks with
even before _me_, whose blushes none can recollect? Why do you love me?"

"_O dios!_" said Van Dorn; "I love thee for these spells of splendor,
dark night and noonday passion, the alternations of earth and hell that
eclipse heaven altogether. I love to see thee fear, though fearing
nothing here, because I see nothing that you fear beyond the grave. You
hate this boy?"

"I hate him worse than wrinkles. Let him not come to me a child
to-morrow; let him see ghosts long as he lives."

"How are the prisoners, Patty?"

"Why, the white nigger, dovey, is sick to-day; blood-loss and blisters
have give him fever. My nigger, that I tied--ha! ha! a good job for
Patty Cannon, at her age!--says t'other's a pore coaster named Jimmy
Phoebus."

"Joe must be ready for a quick departure," the Captain exclaimed, "when
we come back from Dover: it is a bold undertaking, and the whole of the
little state will be aroused like a black snake uncoiling in one's
pocket."

The woman pointed from her shoulder towards the inner room, and spoke
even lower than before:

"Van Dorn, I have a customer."

"For negroes?"

"No, for Huldy. He shall have her."

* * * * *

As Levin Dennis stood at the cross-roads without, he saw a strange man
ploughing in the farm so recently deserted by his hostess for the gayer
cross-road