"

"I thought so," returned the man, without altering his position; "you
don't know ME. You never saw ME before. Well, I'm Jim Dawson, the nephew
of L'Hommadieu, YOUR OLD MASTER!"

She gripped the iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked
herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that
seemed stamped there. It was remarkable that with that smile she flung
away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder
audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face
appeared to have changed.

"I don't say," continued the man quietly, "that he didn't MARRY you
before he died. But you know as well as I do that the laws of his State
didn't recognize the marriage of a master with his octoroon slave! And
you know as well as I do that even if he had freed you, he couldn't
change your blood. Why, if I'd been willing to stay at Avoyelles to be a
nigger-driver like him, the plantation of 'de Fontanges'--whose name
you have taken--would have been left to me. If YOU had stayed there,
you might have been my property instead of YOUR owning a square man like
Randolph. You didn't think of that when you came here, did you?" he said
composedly.

"Oh, mon Dieu!" she said, dropping rapidly into a different accent,
with her white teeth and fixed mirthless smile, "so it is a claim for
PROPERTY, eh? You're wanting money--you? Tres bien, you forget we are
in California, where one does not own a slave. And you have a fine story
there, my poor friend. Very pretty, but very hard to prove, m'sieu. And
these peasants are in it, eh, working it on shares like the farm, eh?"

"Well," said Dawson, slightly changing his position, and passing his
hand over the horse's neck with a half-wearied contempt, "one of these
men is from Plaquemine, and the other from Coupee. They know all the
l'Hommadieus' history. And they know a streak of the tar brush when they
see it. They took your measure when they came here last year, and sized
you up fairly. So had I, for the matter of that, when I FIRST saw you.
And we compared notes. But the major is a square man, for all he is your
husband, and we reckoned he had a big enough contract on his hands to
take care of you and l'Hommadieu's half-breeds, and so"--he tossed the
reins contemptuously aside--"we kept this to ourselves."

"And now you want--what--eh?"

"We want an end to this foolery," he broke out roughly, stepping back
from the vehicle, and fac