"Then, Huldy, hear me, lady with such purty eyes,—I must believe in 'em, wicked as all you look at has been! I never stole anything in my life, nor trampled on a worm if I could git out of his path,—so help me my poor mother's prayers! Huldy, how shall I save myself from these wicked men and the laws I never broke till Sunday? Oh, tell me what to do!"
"Do anything but commit their crimes," she answered. "Promise me you will never do that! Let us begin, and be the friends I wished we might be, before I ever heard you speak. What is your name?"
"Levin—Levin Dennis. My father's lost to me, and mother, too."
"Then Heaven has answered my many prayers, Levin, to give me something to cherish and protect. I am almost a woman: oh, what is my dreadful doom?—to become a woman here among these wolves of men, who meet around my stepfather's tavern to buy the blood and souls of people born free. Joe Johnson sells everything; he has often threatened to sell me to some trader whose bold and wicked eyes stared at me so coarsely, and I have heard them talk of a price, as if I was the merchandise to be transferred—I, in whose veins every drop of blood is a white woman's."?
"I want you to watch over me, Huldy: I'm a poor drunken boy, my boat chartered to Joe Johnson fur a week an' paid fur. Tell me what to do, an' I'll do it."
"First," she said, "you must eat something and drink milk—nothing stronger. Their brandy, which they 'still themselves, sets people on fire. I will set the table for you."
It was after the table had been set that Jimmy Phœbus slipped in and devoured the milk and meat, overhearing the continuance of the conversation just given; and when his awkward motions had disturbed these new young friends, Hulda fainted on the stairs before the apparition Levin did not see, and he snatched the kiss that was like plucking a pale-red blossom from some dragon's garden.
That night two horses without saddles came to bring them both to Johnson's Cross-roads, and Levin awoke at Patty Cannon's old residence on the neighboring farm.
He looked out of the small window in the low roof Upon a little garden, where a short, stout, powerfully made woman, barefooted, was taking up some flowers from their beds to put them into boxes of earth.
"Yer, Huldy," exclaimed this woman, "sot 'em all under the glass kivers, honey, so grandmother will have some flowers for her hat next winter. They wouldn't know ole Patty down at Cannon's Ferry ef she didn't come with flowers in her hat."