the
bloodhounds. But Tom was apparently unmoved.

"It won't happen again," he said; and it did not. But on the Saturday
evening, just before the late dinner-hour at Woodlawn, Japheth
Pettigrass, who had been trying to halter a shy filly running loose in
the field across the pike, saw a stirring little drama enacted at the
Woodlawn gates; saw it, and played some small part in it.

It centered on Tom, who was late getting home. He never rode with his
father now if he could avoid it, and Japheth saw him swinging along up
the pike, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of his short
coat. The Woodlawn entrance was a walled semicircle giving back from the
roadway, with the carriage gates hinged to great stone pillars in the
center, and a light iron grille at the side for foot-passengers. Tom's
hand was on the latch of the little gate when two men darted from the
shadow of the nearest pillar and flung themselves on him.

Japheth saw them first and gave a great yell of warning. Tom turned at
the cry, and so was not taken entirely unawares. But the two had beaten
him down and were busily searching him when Japheth dashed across the
pike, shouting as he ran. The footpads persisted until the horse-trader
came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men
with blackened faces and hands. Then they sprang up and vanished in the
gathering dusk.

Tom was conscious when Pettigrass got him on his feet and hastily bound
a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head. He was still conscious
when Japheth walked him slowly up the path to the house, and was sanely
concerned lest his mother should be frightened.

But after they got him to bed he sank into an inert sleep out of which
he awoke the next morning wildly delirious. Ardea's name was oftenest on
his lips in his ravings, and while his strength remained, his calling
for her was monotonously insistent. He seemed to think she was at the
great house across the lawns, and it took the united efforts of Japheth
and Norman to hold him when he tried to get to the window to shout
across for her.

Norman stood it until late Monday afternoon. Then, when Caleb had
relieved him at Tom's bedside, he drove down to Gordonia and wrote the
note to Miss Dabney, sending it up the mountain by one of the Helgerson
boys with strict injunctions to give it to Miss Ardea herself.

The Dabneys came down from the mountain Tuesday morning, and Ardea was
so far from disregarding