ends."
"Yes, but it isn't vacant--we're elected."
The twins were heroes of romance, now, and with rehabilitated
reputations. But they were weary of Western adventure, and straightway
retired to Europe.
Roxy's heart was broken. The young fellow upon whom she had inflicted
twenty-three years of slavery continued the false heir's pension of
thirty-five dollars a month to her, but her hurts were too deep for money
to heal; the spirit in her eye was quenched, her martial bearing departed
with it, and the voice of her laughter ceased in the land. In her church
and its affairs she found her only solace.
The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most
embarrassing situation. He could neither read nor write, and his speech
was the basest dialect of the Negro quarter. His gait, his attitudes, his
gestures, his bearing, his laugh--all were vulgar and uncouth; his
manners were the manners of a slave. Money and fine clothes could not
mend these defects or cover them up; they only made them more glaring and
the more pathetic. The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the
white man's parlor, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the
kitchen. The family pew was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter
into the solacing refuge of the "nigger gallery"--that was closed to him
for good and all. But we cannot follow his curious fate further--that
would be a long story.
The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment
for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was
in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty
percent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the
creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an
error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was not
inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and
loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that
"Tom" was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that
they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services
during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to
that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place,
they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll;
therefore it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt
lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in
this. Everybody