Jimmy tore off a piece of chicken with his teeth, listening voraciously.

"Did you hear anything?" continued the voice; "I thought I did. The dogs are chained up in the smoke-house, and bad people are often coming here; I will go turn the dogs loose."

"Be dogged if you do!" Jimmy reflected. "That's the meanest cat-bird ever I see, fur now it's shut up a-purpose."

There sounded something familiar to the uninvited guest in the voice which seemed to delay this intention; but the cat-bird, with his unaccommodating mood, broke right in again. Then the female continued:

"While the men - who had come armed, expecting trouble - were removing Aunt Betty's goods out of the room, throwing many of them out of the windows, so as to be themselves in sole possession, a sound was heard in the room below, where your meal is now ready, like a panther skipping and lashing his tail; and, before the men could breathe, old Ebenezer Johnson was up the stairs and laying about him. His eyes were full of murder. One man jumped right through that window and rolled off the porch; another he pitched down the stairs; the third was a boy, Joe King, barely grown - he lives not far from this house now - and Ebenezer Johnson dashed him down the stairs, too, and started after him. All his life the boy had been taught to dread that terrible man, and now he was in his hands, or flying before him; and, as he reeled through the room below, out of the door that opens on the back porch, the boy's eyes, in the agony of the fear of death, beheld a rifle leaning there."

"Mighty good thing if it was thar now!" Jimmy inwardly remarked, finishing the chicken, and still hungry.

"Oh, there is a noise somewhere in this house," the voice exclaimed; "I never tell this story but it makes me startled at every sound. The boy, as he whirled past, grasped the long rifle, drew it to his shoulder, and, with a young volunteer's skill - for he had been drilling to fight the British - he put the two balls in that old man's brain. Both balls entered over the left eyebrow, and one passed through the head and was found in the wall; the other never was found.[3] The lawless giant gave a trembling motion through his frame, his eyes glazed, and he sank dead upon the floor without a sound - the wicked had ceased from troubling! Aunt Betty, Aunt Patty, and Aunt Jane, three sisters shaped by him in soul, fell on his body and wept and almost prayed, but it was too late. They buried him near Aunt Betty, in the field behind the pound."

Undertaking to rise from his chair, Jimmy Phoebus made a loud scraping on the floor, and the table-knife fell with a ringing sound.

"Who's there?" cried a voice, and added, "I knew the dogs ought to be loose."

"Who's there?" also asked the other voice, with something very familiar to Phoebus in its sounds.

"E-b-e-n-e-z-e-r John-son!" answered Jimmy, in his deepest bass tones, mentally considering that a ghost might carry more terror than a robber, after that tale.

A little scream followed, and a whispered consultation, and then a girl's bare feet, beautifully moulded, slowly descended the steep stairway, and next a slender, graceful body came into view, and finally a face, delicious as a ripe peach, looked once at the intruder below, and all the pink and bright color faded from it to see, standing there, where Ebenezer Johnson had given up the ghost, a stalwart effigy, bandaged in white all round the head, and over the left eye and cheek, where the dead river-pirate had received his double bullet, the blood was hideously matted and not wholly stanched even yet. She sank slowly down upon the steps and saw no more.