ions now became the host, and motioned
his guests to the corner of the apartments where stood a long
sideboard of dark mahogany, bearing different crystal decanters.
Himself refraining, as did one or two others, he passed glasses,
motioned to the ancient colored man, and, raising his own hand,
proposed them a toast.

"Gentlemen,--the Union!"

They bowed to him ceremoniously, each in his way, with reverence,
touching lips to his glass. As they parted, one for a moment stood
alone, the dark man who had sat at the speaker's right. For a
moment he paused, as though absorbed, as finally he set down his
glass, gazing steadily forward as though striving to read what lay
in the future.

"The Union!" he whispered, almost to himself.

It might have been the voice, as it was the thought of all those
who, now passing, brought to a close this extraordinary meeting.

The Union!

CHAPTER IX

TALLWOODS

Meantime, events which might have held interest in certain circles
in Washington had they been known, passed on their course, and
toward that very region which had half in jest been named as the
storm center of the day--the state of Missouri, anomalous,
inchoate, discordant, half North, half South, itself the birth of
compromise and sired by political jealousy; whither, against her
will, voyaged a woman, herself engine of turbulence, doubt and
strife, and in company now of a savage captor who contemplated
nothing but establishing her for his own use in his own home.

Tallwoods, the home plantation of the Dunwody family in the West,
now the personal property of the surviving son, state senator
Warville Dunwody of Missouri, presented one of the contrasts which
now and again might have been seen in our early western
civilization. It lay somewhat remote from the nearest city of
consequence, in a region where the wide acres of the owner blended,
unused and uncultivated, with those still more wild, as yet
unclaimed under any private title. Yet in pretentiousness, indeed
in assuredness, it might have rivaled many of the old estates of
Kentucky, the Carolinas, or Virginia; so much did the customs and
ambitions of these older states follow their better bred sons out
into the newer regions.

These men of better rank, with more than competency at their
disposal, not infrequently had few neighbors other than the humble
but independent frontiersman who left for new fields when a dog
barked within fifty miles of his cabin.