a lope, and Colonel Shelby
followed his example. After a while they turned into one of the narrow
lanes that ran through Beardsley's cultivated fields to the woods that
lay behind them, galloped past Mrs. Brown's cheerless cabin, and at last
drew rein before the door of one that was still more cheerless and
dilapidated. It stood in one corner of a little patch of ground that had
been planted to corn and potatoes, and which had received such slight
care and attention of late years that the blackberry briars were
beginning to take possession of it. A small pack of lean and hungry coon
dogs greeted the visitors as they stopped in front of the cabin, and
their yelping soon brought their master to the door. He was the same
lazy Kelsey we once saw sitting on the front porch of Mrs. Gray's house,
only his hair was longer, his whiskers more tangled and matted, and his
clothes worse for wear.

"Alight and hitch," was the way in which he welcomed Captain Beardsley
and his companion. "Git out, ye whelps!"

"Can't stop so long," replied the captain. "Been over to Mrs. Gray's to
see how my pilot was getting on, and tried to scare up a job for you at
overseering, in the place of that chap who was took off in the night
time."

"I dunno's I am a-caring for a job of that sort," answered Kelsey. "I've
got a sight of work of my own that had oughter be did."

"That's so," said Beardsley, glancing at the broken fences, the bare
wood-yard and the briars that were encroaching upon the borders of the
little field. "But there's no ready money in your work, while there is a
sight of it up to the Grays."

"I won't work for no sich," declared Kelsey. "They think too much of
their niggers."

"They set a heap more store by them nor they do by such poor folks as
you be. But you needn't bother. They won't take you and give you a
chance to keep your head above water, and put a bite of grub into the
mouths of your family and a few duds on their backs. They allowed that
they wouldn't have no such trifling hound as you on their place."

"Did Mrs. Gray use them words about me?" exclaimed Kelsey, growing
excited on the instant.

"I heard somebody say them very words, but I aint naming no names; nor I
aint been nowheres except up to Mrs. Gray's to-day. One of 'em allowed
that if you wasn't too doggone useless to live, you'd go and 'list on
the Island."

"I'm jest as good as they be," said the man, who by this time was
looking as though he felt v