greatest care."

A sudden thought made Hulda stand still, and cast the color from her
cheeks.

"They are all going away. I shall be taken, too, or kept for worse evil
here. My mother, in Florida, hates me; she has told me so. I know the
marriage Allan McLane means for me--to be his white slave! Levin is
poor, and his mother is poor, too; they say Patty Cannon has buried
gold. Perhaps God will point it out to me."

She slipped down the Seaford road, and walked up the lane in the fields
she knew so well. No person was in the hip-roofed cottage. Hulda went
among the outbuildings, and began to inspect the beehives, made of
sections of round trees, and the big wooden flower-pots Patty Cannon had
left behind her.

She was only interrupted by a gun being fired in the ploughed field, and
saw the pertinacious buzzards there fall dead from the air as they
exasperated the ploughman.

* * * * *

"I shall have one piece of fun in Maryland before I go," Hulda heard her
stepfather say, as he went past her bed to ascend the hatchway at morn,
"and that is to burn the nigger who mugged me. This is his day."

Almost immediately he came, cursing, down the ladder, followed by a
jeering laugh from above, and the cry, "We'll all see you hanged yit, by
smoke! an' mash another egg on your countenance, nigger-buyer!"

In a moment or two a tremendous quarrel was going on below stairs
between the kidnapper and his wife's mother, and Hulda believed they
were murdering each other; and, peeping once to see, beheld Johnson
holding Patty to the floor, and stuffing her elegant hair, which had
been torn out in the scuffle, into her mouth.

"I'll be the death of you, old fence, before I go," he shouted; "the
verdict would be, 'I did the county a service.'"

"Come away there!" cried Allan McLane, pushing past Hulda and between
the combatants. "Shame on you, Joe! To whip your grandmother is hardly
conservative. Here is an errand that will pay you well: my wench Virgie
has been caught."

The kidnapper released the woman and turned to his guest.

"Good news!" he said; "ef it puts my neck in the string, I'll fetch her
fur you."

His countenance had begun to assume a sensual expression, when Patty
Cannon, to whom his back was turned, rushed upon him like a tornado,
lifted him from his feet, and threw him through the back door into the
yard and bolted him out. McLane retreated by the other door.

"Thank heaven!" r