answered Tom with quiet emphasis. Tim walked away laughing.

Tom stepped out of the house, and with his wooden leg marked a dead line around the house about ten feet from each corner. To the crowd that stood near he said in a clear ringing voice as he stood up in the doorway.

66

I'll kill the first nigger that crosses that line.”

There was no attempt to cross it. They did not like the look of Tom's face as he sat there pale and silent. And they could hear the sobs of his wife inside.

The sale was a brief formality. There was but one bidder, the Honourable Tim Shelby. It was knocked down to Tim for the sum of eighty-five dollars, the exact amount of the tax levy which Legree and his brigands had fixed.

Tim was not buying on his own account. He was the purchasing agent of the subsidiary ring which Legree had organised to hold the real estate forfeited for taxes until a rise in value would bring them millions of profit. They had stolen from the state Treasury the money to capitalise this company. Where it was possible to exact a cash ransom, they always took it and cancelled the tax order, preferring the certainty of good gold in their pockets to the uncertainties of politics.

They tried their best to get a cash ransom of ten thousand dollars for the town of Hambright. But the ruined people could not raise a thousand. So Tim Shelby as the agent of the "Union Land and Improvement Company," became the owner of farm after farm and home after home.

It was a vain hope that relief could come from any quarter. The red flag of the Sheriff's auctioneer fluttered from two thousand three hundred and twenty doors in the county. This was over two-thirds of the total.

Those who were saved, just escaped by the skin of their teeth. They sold old jewelry or plate that had been hidden in the war, or they sold their corn and provisions, trusting to their ability to live on dried fruit, berries, walnuts, hickory nuts, and such winter vegetables as they could raise in their gardens.

The Preacher secured for Tom a tumbled-down log cabin on the outskirts of town, with a half-acre of poor red hill land around it, which his wife at once transformed into a garden. She took up the bulbs and flowers that she had tended so lovingly about the door of their old home, and planted them with tears around this desolate cabin. Now and then she would look down at the work and cry. Then she would go bravely back to it. As nobody occupied her old home, she went back and forth until she moved all the jonquils and sweet pinks from the borders of the garden walk, and reset them. in the new garden. She moved then her strawberries and rapsberries, and gooseberries, and set her fall cabbage plants. In three weeks she had transformed a desolate red clay lot into a smiling garden. She had watered every plant daily, and Tom had watched her with growing wonder and love.

"Ole woman, you're an angel!" he cried, "if God had sent one down from the skies she couldn't have done any more."

*

*

*

The problem which pressed heaviest of all on the Preacher's heart in this crisis was how to save Mrs. Gaston's home.

"If that place is sold next week, my dear," he said to his wife," she will never survive."

"I know it. She is sinking every day. It breaks my heart to look at her."

"What can we do?"