“You want to buy this old mule?”
“Er—yes, sir.”
“Have you got twelve dollars to pay for it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s that money—show it to me!”
“It’s up in Gince’s room,” Org said without explaining who Gince was. “I’ll have to go after it.”
“Go! Hurry!” the auctioneer snapped, wiping the perspiration from his face. “What sort of business man are you, leaving your pocketbook lying around? Here, you, Little Bit! Hold old Jinx till this boy comes back!”
Mustard lost no time in getting to Gaitskill’s home, but the resolution which had given speed to his feet oozed away when he arrived, and left him a timorous negro, hesitant, ignorant of how to proceed further to secure the object he had come after. Mustard had no practical experience in this sort of work to guide him now. He realized dimly that it was not becoming that the trusted overseer of a great plantation should sneak into his employer’s home and take something from it, even though the thing he took really belonged to him. But he knew that this was the only way he could get the luck-charm without letting Marse Tom know.
He reconnoitered and assured himself that no one was in the house. He walked through the kitchen, entered the back hall, and climbed cautiously up the back steps. Walking quietly, he went through the upper hall toward the front and stood at last looking into the dainty, exquisite room of the girl in the home.
It took him a long time to muster the courage to go in. It was a pretty room, with ferns and photographs and flowered cretonne, an old rosewood bed of exquisite beauty of design, beside it a small electric lamp with a rose-colored shade. Two windows, shaded by loosely hanging rose-colored silk, a rosewood writing-desk. Mustard saw all this unconsciously. His eyes were set upon the rosewood dressing-table against the wall between the two windows. On the table lay a gold mesh purse; beside the purse were three rings, whose gems could have bought Mustard a barrel full of rabbit-feet!