“After that he changed his course and began to make love to me! Lord, how that man could make love! Ask that gal of your’n! I reckon she could tell you!
“Well, I don’t know how it was to this day! I must ‘a’ been bewitched! But I was such a cornsarned fool that I went and married him! And two weeks after that he levanted, with all my money! Leastways, all to a trifle of about twenty dollars, which I had about me in my room, and which just was enough to take me back to Wild Cats’ Gulch. And, if ever you did see a chop-fallen cuss going home, that was me! The hotel people had even kept my boxes for my board!
“Oh, but the boys was mad when they heard all about it! They was ’most as mad with me for being such a fool as they was with him for robbing me. But they put me up to following of him, telling me if any one could run a man to earth, it would be an injured woman. And they put up a pile for me, and took my boxes out of quod, at the Hidalgo, and started me on my way to ’Frisco, for I knowed he had made for that port.
“And there I found out he had sailed in the Eglea for New Orleans, and I took the first steamer to that port. There I learned that he had stopped at the St. Charles Hotel for a few days, and had then gone to Savannah. Lord, what a chase I had! From Savannah to Mobile; from Mobile to Havana; from Havana back to St. Francisco. And there I heard that he had sailed for Baltimore!
“Well, I took passage on the Blue Bird, bound for Baltimore. There I made the acquaintance of young Roland Bayard, the third mate, who was very good to me. Well, we got to be such good friends that at last, one day, I up and told him all my troubles. And when he heard the name of my rascally husband:
“‘Anglesea,’ says he—‘Angus Anglesea!’ says he. ‘Why, that’s the man who is staying with a neighbor of ours down in Maryland. My old aunt wrote to me about him in the very last letter, which met me at ’Frisco.’
“And he took the letter out of his pocket and gave it to me to read, and, sure as a gun, it was my fine colonel as the old aunty was writing about! And I said to the young man as I must have been put on a false scent to be running about among Southern ports, when he had gone North. And he said there was no doubt in the world that the man himself had put me on the false scent.
“Whether or no that was so, I thought it was very providential I had fell in long o’ this young mate, and we got to be fast friends. And we laid a plot that we should say nothing about it, and he would take me to his aunty’s, and I should go by the name of my first husband, Wright, and lay low and say nothing, for fear my colonel should find me out and run away again before I could nab him.
“Well, we reached Baltimore early in this month, you know, and young Bayard got leave and came home, fetching me along of him. And the fust news as we heard when we got here was as my fine gentleman was gwine to be married to a fine heiress.
“But Roland and I, we winked at each other, and never let on to a single soul as I was the colonel’s lawful wife. We thought we’d just have lots of fun out of the game, anyways, and wait till the wedding day, when all the people should be in the church, and then—in the midst of his triumph—pull him down and disgrace him before all the world.