At a little sandy rill, the only one they crossed, a long water-snake endeavored to escape before the rapid wagon could strike it, but the Captain rose to his feet quick and cat-like, and projected the long lash into the roadside, and the snake writhed and bounded in the air almost cut in two. Then, sitting again and bending so close to Hulda that his long, downy mustache of gold touched her cheek, Van Dorn said, softly:

"Que hermoso! Young wild-flower, let me take a snake out of your path also?"

"Which one, Captain?"

"It does not matter. Name any one."

"Alas!" said Hulda, "I am of them; how can I wish harm to my stepfather and my grand-dame? They are not what I wish, but I am commanded to honor them."

"By whom, fair Hulda?"

"By God. I read it in the Book after I heard it from a slave."

"Donde esta! What slave that we know was so God-read?"

"Poor drunken Dave. He was a good man before he knew us. He told me all the Commandments for a drink of brandy, and I wrote them down and afterwards I found them in a book."

"Chis! chito! how graceful is your mind, Hulda! It comes out of the absolute blank of your condition and discovers things, as the young osprey, untaught before, knows where to dive for fish. Who that ever comes to Johnson's Cross-roads brings the Bible?"

"Colonel McLane."

"He? the self-righteous crocodile! he gave you the Book?"

"Yes. He told me Joe and grandma were good people - 'conservative good people,' I think he called it; but he said you believed nothing, and there was no basis, I think he called it, for 'conservative good' in you."

"O hala hala! But this is good," the Captain softly remarked, stroking his golden mustache with the hand that carried the lustrous ring. "Patty Cannon may be saved; I must be damned; and Allan McLane will sit in judgment. No, I believe nothing, because such as they believe!"

"That is why nobody likes you," Hulda frankly observed, "agreeable as you are."

"And can you believe in anything after the surroundings of your childhood, touching crime like the pond-lily that grows among the water-snakes?"

"The lily cannot help it, and is just as white as if it grew under glass, because"

"Because the lily has none of the blood of the snake?" the captain lisped. "Do you enter that claim?"

"No," said Hulda; "I know I am born from wicked parents, a daughter of crime, my father hanged, my mother of dreadful origin, but never have I felt that God held me accountable for their works if I kept my heart humble and my hands from sin; and never have I been tempted yet from within my own nature to enjoy a single moment of such hideous selfishness. And I thank my kind Maker that something to love and believe in, though unhappy as myself, has come down the sad pathway I looked along so many years, and found me waiting for him."