ge and unregular.
I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I'm a-going
to chance it; I'll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem
most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see
where you'll go to. Then I says:

"Miss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a little ways where you
could go and stay three or four days?"

"Yes; Mr. Lothrop's. Why?"

"Never mind why yet. If I'll tell you how I know the niggers will see
each other again inside of two weeks--here in this house--and PROVE how I
know it--will you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?"

"Four days!" she says; "I'll stay a year!"

"All right," I says, "I don't want nothing more out of YOU than just your
word--I druther have it than another man's kiss-the-Bible." She smiled
and reddened up very sweet, and I says, "If you don't mind it, I'll shut
the door--and bolt it."

Then I come back and set down again, and says:

"Don't you holler. Just set still and take it like a man. I got to tell
the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind,
and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These
uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds
--regular dead-beats. There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand
the rest middling easy."

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal
water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher
all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck
that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she
flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed her
sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with her face afire
like sunset, and says:

"The brute! Come, don't waste a minute--not a SECOND--we'll have them
tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!"

Says I:

"Cert'nly. But do you mean BEFORE you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or--"

"Oh," she says, "what am I THINKING about!" she says, and set right down
again. "Don't mind what I said--please don't--you WON'T, now, WILL you?"
Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would
die first. "I never thought, I was so stirred up," she says; "now go on,
and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do, and whatever you say
I'll do it."

"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two frauds, and I'm fixed so I
got to