"I'll give you a job, Owen," said Johnson, quick on his feet as the boy. "Run these horses into my wagon thar while I git some duds together before I hop the twig."

Slipping to the rear of the house, he entered, and looked in Patty's room - she was not there; a slight smell of gunpowder seemed to be in the hall. Passing rapidly up the stairs, Johnson saw a light shine in McLane's room, and he kicked the door wide open, exclaiming,

"Bad luck everywhere; the gal's stone dead; the beaks are round us. Wake up, McLane!"

"Joe!" said a voice, and Patty Cannon threw her arms around him.

"To burning fire with you!" bellowed the filial son. "Take your arms away!"

"Let us make up, Joe! Everybody has run away from us. Huldy is gone, too. McLane is dead."

"Dead? Dead where?"

"There" - she pointed to a feather-bed lying upon the floor, the outlines of which seemed unusually pointed and stiff for feathers, though it was sown up in its own blankets and quilts. Joe Johnson touched it with his foot and bounded back.

"Hell-cat!" he cried, "is this one of your tricks?"

"I did it fur you, Josie. He brought it on hisself. There's his portmanteau full of money to pay our travelling expenses. He's sewed up beautiful, and in the bay you can drop him to the bottom."

Joe Johnson's face became almost livid pale, and, rushing upon Patty Cannon with both hands raised, he struck her to the floor and put his boot upon her.

"If I had time, I'd have your life," he hissed. "But it would lose the uptucker a job. To-night I leave you forever. Margaretta, your daughter, wishes never to see you again. Take this crib and the blood you still must shed to keep your old heart warm, and take my curse to choke you on the gallows!"

He rushed away and gave a low whistle at the window; Daw and Joe's brother, Ebenezer, a lower set and more sinister being, bounded up the stairs and loosened and drove before them the little band of captives.

"One word from you, white nigger, in all this journey to-day, scatters your brains in the woods!"

Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phoebus saw his nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.

"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed, and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau thrown in beside it.

"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take the poor old woman that's raised you along."

"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it to you."

He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little bar and moaned,

"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"

How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she shouted,