d he. Hiram never so much as moved his eyes. "As for you,"
said Levi, whirling round upon Dinah, who was clearing the table, and
glowering balefully upon the old negress, "you put them things down and
git out of here. Don't you come nigh this kitchen again till I tell
ye to. If I catch you pryin' around may I be----, eyes and liver, if I
don't cut your heart out."

In about half an hour Levi's friends came; the first a little, thin,
wizened man with a very foreign look. He was dressed in a rusty black
suit and wore gray yarn stockings and shoes with brass buckles. The
other was also plainly a foreigner. He was dressed in sailor fashion,
with petticoat breeches of duck, a heavy pea-jacket, and thick boots,
reaching to the knees. He wore a red sash tied around his waist, and
once, as he pushed back his coat, Hiram saw the glitter of a pistol
butt. He was a powerful, thickset man, low-browed and bull-necked, his
cheek, and chin, and throat closely covered with a stubble of blue-black
beard. He wore a red kerchief tied around his head and over it a cocked
hat, edged with tarnished gilt braid.

Levi himself opened the door to them. He exchanged a few words outside
with his visitors, in a foreign language of which Hiram understood
nothing. Neither of the two strangers spoke a word to Hiram: the little
man shot him a sharp look out of the corners of his eyes and the burly
ruffian scowled blackly at him, but beyond that neither vouchsafed him
any regard.

Levi drew to the shutters, shot the bolt in the outer door, and tilted
a chair against the latch of the one that led from the kitchen into the
adjoining room. Then the three worthies seated themselves at the table
which Dinah had half cleared of the supper china, and were presently
deeply engrossed over a packet of papers which the big, burly man had
brought with him in the pocket of his pea-jacket. The confabulation was
conducted throughout in the same foreign language which Levi had used
when first speaking to them--a language quite unintelligible to Hiram's
ears. Now and then the murmur of talk would rise loud and harsh over
some disputed point; now and then it would sink away to whispers.

Twice the tall clock in the corner whirred and sharply struck the
hour, but throughout the whole long consultation Hiram stood silent,
motionless as a stock, his eyes fixed almost unwinkingly upon the three
heads grouped close together around the dim, flickering light of the
candle a