the
only warrant that can drive them from Maryland."

He laid a roll of bank-notes on the table suggestively.

"No wealth is accumulated in vain," said Meshach Milburn, his delicate
nostrils distended and his fine hand pointing to the bank-bills. "Now,
_war_ on Johnson's Cross Roads!"

He crossed the old room over the store, and, opening the green chest,
brought out the Entailed Hat, and took it in his hand with a grim smile.

"Here is something I thought to lay aside on my wife's account," he
spoke. "Her people compel me to wear it! I thought all malice to this
poor hat would be done with my social triumph here. But I am not a man
to be frightened. Let them kill me, but it shall be under my ancestral
brim."

"Oh! hear your mocking-bird sing again as it did:
'Vesta--Meshach--Love!' Where is the bird?"

Meshach Milburn shook his head and put the Entailed Hat upon it. "Tom
left me," he said, "when they began to fire bullets at my Hat."

* * * * *

Vesta's female instinct had already found the explanation of Wonnell's
death.

From the moment of knowing her husband, his fatal hat had been the
shadow across her life's path. His person had never been offensive to
her, and something attractive or modifying in him had led her, when a
child, to offer a flower to his hat, to give it consonance with himself,
that seemed to deserve less evil.

A fancied insult to his hat had made him quarrel with her father, a
quarrel which involved her conquest, not by wooing, but by the treaty of
war. The same hat had inspired the superstition which led her kitchen
servants to leave their comfortable home, and had been the insuperable
obstacle to her mother's consent to her marriage. It had caused the only
bitter words that ever passed between her and her father. At last it had
spilled blood, and her uncle, she well knew, from his implacable
nature, had set the ruffians on, and she knew as well that her husband
had found him out.

His intelligence, which would have been otherwise a matter of pride to
her, became a subject of fear, involved with his hat.

Then, the loss of Virgie was hardly less severe to Vesta than her own
mother's.

It was true that Roxy, pretty and loving, now poured all her devotion at
her mistress's feet, but there had been something in Virgie that Roxy
could never rise to--a dignity and self-reliance hardly less than a
white woman's. Vesta shed bitter tears at the news of that