When Mrs. Ware reached home that afternoon she found Marshal Hanscomb and his men, baffled and angry, completing their search of the house.
“Mr. Hanscomb, what does this mean?” she demanded.
“It means that runaway niggers have been making a hiding place of your house and that we’ve been barely too late to catch one.”
“I assure you, Mr. Hanscomb, that nothing of the sort has been going on in my house. Dr. Ware’s sympathies, it is true, are with the anti-slavery cause, but he is not a nigger-stealer.”
“If you think so, madam,”—there was the hint of a sneer in his tone—“you’d better go out to the woodshed and look at that room built into the middle of your woodpile and see how lately it’s been occupied.”
She turned upon him a face of offended dignity. Her small, plump figure, in its balloon-like skirt, stiffened with a haughtiness which impressed even the angry marshal. “I trust, sir, that you have satisfied yourself there is no one concealed in the house or on the premises.”
“We have, madam, for the present. We happened to be a few minutes too late.”
“Then I will bid you good-evenin’.” With a stately nod she left him, going at once to her own room, behind whose closed door she remained until her husband’s return.
Rhoda and her father, coming from opposite directions, drove up to their east gate at the same moment, in the red glow of a March sunset. She told him hurriedly of the happenings of the afternoon and of the narrow chance by which she had finally saved the mulatto lad from recapture. At the veranda steps Jim met them, with an excited account of the marshal’s visit and his search of the house. He evidently knew of the woodshed hiding place, the man said, for he went to it at once.
“Was any one at home?”