tice. She
had enormous strength and capacity for endurance, she learned rapidly,
kept her own counsel, obeyed no command unless she chose to do so, and
feared nothing in the Lord's universe. The people of her own race had
little in common with her. They never understood her and so they feared
her. And being as it were outcast by them, she came to know more of the
ways and customs, and even the thoughts, of the white people better than
of her own. Being quick to imitate, she spoke in the correcter language
of those whom she knew best, rather than the soft, ungrammatical dialect
of the plantation slave or the grunt and mumble of the isolated African.
Realizing that service was to be her lot, she elected to render that
service where and to whom she herself might choose.

One day she had walked into New Orleans and boarded a Mississippi
steamer bound for St. Louis. It took three men to eject her bodily from
the deck into a deep and dangerous portion of the stream. She swam
ashore, and when the steamer made its next stop she walked aboard again.
The three men being under the care of a physician, and the remainder of
the crew burdened with other tasks, she was not again disturbed. Some
time later she appeared at the landing below Fort Leavenworth, and
strode up the slope to the deserted square where Esmond Clarenden stood
before his little store alone in the deepening twilight.

I have heard that she had had a way of appearing suddenly, like a beast
of prey, in the dusk of the evening, and that few men cared to meet her
at that time alone.

My uncle was a snug-built man, sixty-two inches high, with small,
shapely hands and feet. Towering above him stood this great, strange
creature, barefooted, ragged, half tiger, half sphinx.

"I'm hungry. I'll eat or I kill. I'm nobody's slave!"

The soft voice was full of menace, the glare of famine and fury was in
the burning eyes, and the supple cruelty of the wild beast was in the
clenched hands.

Esmond Clarenden looked up at her with interest. Then pointing toward
our house he said, calmly:

"Neither are you anybody's master. Go over there to the kitchen and get
your supper. If you can cook good meals, I'll pay you well. If you
can't, you'll leave here."

Possibly it was the first time in her strange and varied career that she
had taken a command kindly, and obeyed because she must. And so the
savage African princess, the terror of the terrible slave-ship, the
untamed planta