"To who! to who!" screamed a voice out of the hollow chimney.

"Well," answered Jimmy, hardly excited, "I ain't partickler. Ha! I thought I knew you, Barney," he continued, as an owl fluttered out and hopped up a ruined stairway.

"Now, British money ain't coined by Uncle Sam; what is the date? I can make figgers out easy: Eighteen hundred and fifteen!' I was about to do Ebenezer Johnson the onjustice of saying that he'd sold his country out to ole Admiral Cockburn, but the war was done when this money was coined. Whose was it?"

He removed more carefully some of the bricks, to put his hand in the hollow depository left there, and, feeling around and higher up, brought out the bronze hilt of a sword, on which was a name.

"Who would have thought this was a house of learnin'?" Jimmy said, dubiously. "I can't read it. By smoke! maybe they've murdered somebody yer. I reckon he was British. Ellenory kin read it, if I live to see her agin."

There was nothing more, and, as he left the rotting old house, a crash and a cloud of smoke rose up behind him, and the chimney fell into the middle of the floor.

With the crane's sharp wrought-iron point and long leverage the pungy captain succeeded, after tedious efforts, in breaking the links of the chain and also in removing the linked cannon-ball from the woman's foot, but he could not remove the iron band and link around her ankle.

"God bless you!" exclaimed the woman. "It's a sin to say so, but I feel as if I could fly since that dreadful weight is off. Oh, I want to fly, for I dreamed of my baby, an' he smiled at me from heaven as if he said, 'I'm happy, mamma!'"

"You don't owe me nothin', Mary. I love a widder, as you air, an' she begged me to come yer. When you git to Prencess Anne, whar I want you to go, find Ellenory Dennis, an' tell her I've seen her boy, an' I'll bring him back if I kin."

"Princess Anne? where is it?"

"It's maybe, forty mile from yer, Mary; half-way between sunrise and sunset."

"Right south, sir?"

"That's it. Now I'll tell you how to git thar. Take this old woods road along Broad Creek and walk to Laurel, five miles; it's a little town on the creek. Keep in under the woods, but don't lose the road, fur every foot of it's dangerous to niggers. You kin git thar, maybe, by dark. I don't know nobody thar, Mary, an' I can't write, fur I never learned how. But you go right to the house of some preacher of the Gospel, and tell him a lie."

Mary opened her eyes.

"I wouldn't have you tell a lie to anybody but a good man," continued Phoebus, "fur then it's so close to the Lord it won't git fur an' pizen many, as lies always does. You must tell that preacher that you're the runaway slave of Judge Custis of Prencess Anne, an' you're sorry you run away, an' want to go home."

"Oh, sir, you are not like my wicked husband, trying to sell me too?"

"No, Mary, bad as you've been used, faith's your only sure friend. If you was to tell the preacher you had been kidnapped, he'd, maybe, be afraid to help you. They're a timid set down yer on any subject concernin' niggers; these preachers will help save black folks' souls, but never rescue their pore broken bodies. When you tell him you are the slave of a rich man like Judge Custis, he'll jump at the chance to do the Judge a favor, an' tell you that you do right to go back to your master. That's whair he's a liar, Mary - so he'll scratch your lie off."