CHAPTER XXIX.

FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH.

Judge Paul Foley, as the faithful reader of this true chronicle has long ere this learned, was a sincere friend of the young fellow upon whom the heavy hand of impecuniosity was now for the first time laid. He had taxed the ingenuity acquired in a long practice with money-sharks and prodigal debtors, to find some remedy by which Ravenscroft might be spared the sound of the sheriff's hammer; but compound interest computed by Pepper on the one hand, and the discovery of many unsettled debts, both of Archie's and of the estate's, left no room in which that ingenuity could find play.

It then occurred to him to suggest to Mr. Robert Cleburne, who had with due formality requested the honor of becoming his son-in-law, that Mr. Moran would prefer seeing the lien in the hands of a friend, and as he, Judge Foley, was bankrupted by the war and could not therefore assist, that Mr. Cleburne should do so. But Mr. Cleburne's promise to that effect was based in part upon getting a five thousand dollar moiety from the fine accruing to Uncle Sam by reason of Mr. Frank Hubbard's waywardness as a manufacturer of tax-paid tobacco; which fine, by reason of more of Mr. Hubbard's waywardness, in connection with wicked men who came in with prior liens, never reached the treasury. Mr. Cleburne had therefore to write his future father-in-law a letter retracting his promise, in which letter he was forced to acknowledge that Mr. Hubbard had overreached him and employed the talk of compromising his troubles with the Commissioner of Revenue merely for the sake of gaining time.

There was much abuse of the government's attorneys in Virginia, who it seems were likewise the attorneys of the railroad

in which Mr. Hubbard, after going through bankruptcy, found himself a large share-owner; but all of the letter with which we are concerned was that part which assured Judge Foley that the money to pay off Mr. Pepper's mortgage on Ravenscroft would not come through Mr. Cleburne, much as that gentleman desired to accommodate his friend Moran.

As to Archie, he was not earning enough clear cash to keep down the interest, and the conclusion at last came home to both Judge and Consul, that the sooner the debt was collected by legal process, the larger would be the surplus left to the mortgagor.

This conclusion, the result of much correspondence between Dunham and Naples, was in time made known to Mr. Pepper, who was continually urging his anxiety to accommodate both Judge Foley and young Moran, instancing in proof of this his taking up the bank's debt as his own, only after he had advanced several interest installments, and then his kindly allowing the debtor to mortgage in security of what was, in truth, a fairlytimed note of hand.

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It was not till old Jim was sent for by Judge Foley on the afternoon of General Lollamead's arrival in Dunham, (Mr. Pepper being sick in bed,) and introduced to the great man from the North, who had come up to bid in his young master's home, that a full sense of the situation dawned upon the humble African mind.

The advertisements of sale he had seen put up and taken down ; the actual day of sale had come and been postponed by Judge Foley in consequence of Mr. Pepper's kind instructions, and great delight had Jim taken in the disappointment of the village prophets, who had said this one would buy Ravenscroft for so much, and another for so much.

All the while had remained in his black, but staunchly loyal breast, the confident hope that the young master across the water was a Republican office-holder, revelling in boundless affluence and forgetful of the old place only till his attention should be called to its danger, when, so Jim told all the Ravens

croft tenants, there would come a check for the money and nobody would ever hear anything more from that scandalous Ku Klux, the sheriff of Dunham.

But on the afternoon when the portly Lollamead interviewed him at length about the crop prospects, confirmed and continued his agency in the name of Mr. Pepper, directed in detail what should be done as to the care of the house, winding up with the information that he would buy in the property on the following Monday, and appointing to meet Jim in the town on that day-not till this occurred did the steady faith in final restoration to the old order of things give way.

Even the business-loving Carpet-Bagger was affected by the uncontrollable emotions to which the aged steward-for many years a chattel slave on this particular property—surrendered himself.

Not till the General returned to his hotel, and, from Judge Foley's own lips, confirmation of the truth of all that had been said was dinned into his ears and brain, did Jim mount his mule and turn his face towards a home, which he inwardly swore would be home to him no longer.

This was on Thursday and the sale was to be on the Monday following-too short a time Jim said for any news to come across the big sea that swept between him and the boy he had taught to swim, to ride and to shoot-now seemingly careless of his old home and his old teacher.

A mile out of town Jim overtook old Kroom returning from his regular trade visit to Dunham, for coffee, tobacco, and the smaller spices of country comfort demanded by his large family of fatherless grandchildren. With familiar respect he rode alongside his white brother and hailed him.

"Good evening, Mr. Kroom."

"That you, Jim! Good evening. What you been to town for?" said the other, as if the numerous packages which stuffed his saddle wallets showed clearly the nature of his own visit.

“ De same ole trubble, my fren, for you is my fren and de fren of my young boss, consarnin' of de sale of de Ravinskroff plan

tashun. It's a kummin dis time and no mistake. De ole place will go nex Monday at de Court house door, and Jim had ruther be sleepin' on de grave-yard hill alongside ole Miss, dan know it for a fack to be jist as it is."

"Who's a going to buy it?" asked Gilbert Kroom. “Foley, I guess, won't he?"

"Pray God he waz," said Jim, "but he ain't. It's a Yankee frum de North what talked to me about it—some bank man my young boss borrow munny frum."

"Some d-d Carpet-Bagger I expect," said old Kroom, and continuing, "Jim you 've always heard of me as a Union man during the war and since, ain't you?”

"Dat's so, Mr. Kroom, every word of it."

"Well now, mark you, I'd burn a house of mine 'fore any Carpet-Bagger should live in it, do you understand that?" exclaimed Kroom with excitement.

"A body could n't blame you," said Jim in sympathy, and with a musing regret that he was not a white man to execute a similar vow to Kroom's in the case of Ravenscroft.

At the forks of the road the two men parted, Kroom bidding his black friend good-bye, with a sincere expression of feeling for the fallen fortunes of the Moran family, and asserting over and over again, that if the old governor were alive the devil would be to play before such a scheme as was now on foot could succeed.

As Jim turned down from the main highway to enter the avenue which led up to the old mansion, his mind was turning up-side down with the weight of Kroom's parting words, and he seemed to feel himself the embodied majesty of all the departed Ravenscroft glories. He alone was left, weak and feeble, to ward off the shame that was about to be put upon the old name. . His native African passion was dignified by this reflection, and toned to its work the more by Kroom's words. The valley beneath had never impressed his rough breast with any sense of beauty till now; the old Moran manor house, always regarded by him as much a matter of fact to the county under that name

as the Court House itself, seemed to look mournfully desolate in the sunset of this bitter spring day.

All that night and the next day he went sleepless and moping —his ears still ringing with Kroom's defiance of the alien class, one of whom was to purchase the old home, which had so long given him kind shelter, and honored him with a vice-regal authority, not only over the colored quarter, but which included in its scope a general advisory management of the humble white tenants, who occupied the out-lying lands of the farm.

At length his determination became fixed to prevent the ancient croft from being handed over by the sheriff as residence for a stranger. He was not lost to a sense of the risks to be encountered, but felt in every fibre ›

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Stronger to suffer than Hell is to harm."

Thinking thus, he had a definite plan of action mapped out by Saturday afternoon, when the usual half holiday was taken by all the farm hands, who repaired to town for purposes of trade and gossip.

Since Archie's departure no one had occupied any part of the big house save Jim and his wife, who slept in the servants' room next the kitchen--those two rooms being connected with the main building in such a manner as to make the whole resemble in shape the letter L.

The farm hands with their families occupied the row of cabins, which in slave times had been known as "the Quarter ” --a half mile distant. There was but one white man on the plantation-a tenant who had recently built at the extreme lower end of the horseshoe-shaped valley.

It was in the early days of March and the farm work was in full progress; but for the first time, so the negroes afterwards remarked, received little or none of old Jim's careful attention..

On this particular Saturday afternoon he was urgent in furthering his wife's wish to go to Dunham in the farm wagon, in company with various others of the hired help, and after her departure was the sole human being about the house.