"That I could arrange," Mr. Chambers said. "I could look in there myself in the morning, and say that as it was so late and the night dark I had asked you to stay at my house till morning, and that you had gone off without returning to the town. Ah, there are my wife and daughters!"
DOWN COUNTRY
"This is Mr. Harberton, to whom we all owe our lives," Mr. Chambers said as his wife, followed by her two daughters, girls of sixteen and eighteen, entered the room.
"I do not know how to thank you, sir," Mrs. Chambers said as she shook hands with Yorke, "for assuredly we should all have been murdered had it not been for your warning and assistance."
"It is rather to my man than to myself you are indebted, Mrs. Chambers, for it is he who overheard the conversation this afternoon at which the affair was finally arranged. He showed greater sharpness than I should have given him credit for. As an ordinary thing he would merely have taken a glass of liquor and left the place; but the fact that the men in the saloon stopped speaking when he went in, and asked him whether he spoke English, and were not satisfied that he could not, but went into another room to talk, excited his curiosity, and, sitting with his ear against the partition, he was able to make out what they were saying."
"That was very sharp of him," Mrs. Chambers said; "but it is pretty certain he would have taken no steps in the matter had it not been for your leading, especially as he was himself, as I understand from my husband, instrumental in aiding your escape from prison, and so dared not attract attention.
"Do not, I beg of you, try to minimize the service you have rendered us, for you certainly will not lessen the obligation that we are under to you. I shudder to think of the great danger we have escaped. I know it is not likely that another attack will be made yet, but I shall never feel comfortable here after this, and my husband has promised to take us into our town house to-morrow morning, to stop till the war is over. We hope you will go with us."