“Yes, miss, he is my owner—and also my brother!”
“What!” Her horrified exclamation made him look at her again more sharply and he saw a scarlet flush mounting to her brow.
“You needn’t be surprised!” he went on hotly. “It’s common enough in slavery. We had the same father. Good-by, miss! God bless you!”
Still gripping his revolver he dropped behind the bushes. Rhoda, intently listening, heard him scrambling through the mouth of the cave. “Is it all right?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” came the muffled reply.
“You can put up your pistol,” she went on, and even the desperate fugitive huddled in the darkness of the cave, the blood pounding in his ears, was conscious of a sharp hardness in her repressed tones that had not been there before. “I promise he shall not find you!”
Rhoda sped back up the hill, at first conscious of little but a whirling in her head and a weight like stone in her breast. As she neared the highest point in the path she heard footsteps coming toward her. Instantly her nerves seemed to steady themselves and her mind grew clear. Holding her riding skirt with one hand she began breaking branches from the flowering viburnum that grew thickly beneath the trees. So Jefferson Delavan saw her as he hastily rounded the bend in the trail beside the boulder.
“Rhoda!” he exclaimed in joyful surprise, “you here!” In his sudden lover’s gladness he did not notice that there was no answering surprise in her face. He sprang toward her, but she moved back a step or two and shifted her handful of flowering branches from the curve of her arm, holding it between them.
“Yes, I’m here—I—I wanted some flowers.”
His glance darted anxiously beyond, but came back and rested upon her tenderly.