t be tender the way we talk of it. I was an honest man once, captain,
but I am a rascal now; warp and woof, skin-deep and heart-deep, ay, to
the bones and marrow,--I am all the way a rascal! But don't look as if
you was astonished already. I come to make a clean breast of all sorts of
matters, jist, captain, for a little bit of your advantage and my own:
and there's things coming that will make you look a leetle of a sight
wilder! And, first and foremost, to begin. Have you any particular
longing to be out of this here Injun town, and well shut of the d--d fire
torture?"

"Have I any desire to be free! Mad question!"

"Well, captain, I'm jist the man, and the only one, that can help you;
for them that would, can't, and them that can, won't. And, secondly and
lastly, captain, as the parsons say in the settlements, have you any
hankering to be the master of the old major, your uncle's lands and
houses?"

"If you come to mock and torture me,"--said Roland, but was interrupted
by the renegade.

"It is jist to save you from the torture," said he, "that I'm now
speaking; for, cuss me, the more I think of it, the more I can't stand it
no-how. I'm a rascal, captain, but I'm no tiger-cat, especially to them
that hasn't misused me, and there's the grit of a man about you that
strikes my feelings exactly. But, you see, captain, there's a bargain
first to be struck between us, afore I comes up to the rack--but I'll
make tarms easy."

"Make them what you will, and But, alas! where shall I find means to
repay you? I who am robbed of everything?"

"Didn't I say I could help you to the major's lands and houses? and a'n't
they a fortun' for an emperor?"

"You! _you_ help me? help me to _them_?"

"Captain," said the renegade, with sundry emphatic nods of the head, "I'm
a sight more of a rascal than you ever dreamed on! and this snapping of
you up by Injun deviltry, that you think so hard of, is but a small part
of my misdoings: I've been slaving agin you this sixteen years, more of
less, _slaving_ (that's the word, for I made a niggur of myself) to rob
you of these here very lands that I'm now thinking of helping you to! You
don't believe me, captain! Well, did you ever hear of a certain honest
feller of old Augusta, called John Atkinson?"

"Hah!" cried the soldier, looking with new eyes upon the renegade; "you
are then the fellow upon whose perjured testimony Braxley relied to
sustain his frauds?"

"The identical same man,