"I am sold," the girl gasped, with terror on her tongue and in her wild eyeballs. "Miss Vesty's sold me to her Uncle Allan. He's sent the kidnappers after me. They're yonder, in Princess Anne. Oh, drive me to the North, to the swamps, anywhere but there!"
"I know your mistress made you over to her mother, Virgie, for a precaution, fearing you might not be safe in her own hands. She told me so, and asked if the death of her mother could possibly affect you."
"Oh, it has!" the girl whispered. "Mary knows the kidnapper that's come for me. He is the same that stole Hominy and the children. He kept her chained on an island. He says he'll have me to-night, to do as he pleases. Master McLane lets him have me!"
The girl, in her terror, as the carriage had descended the hill already and crossed the Manokin, seized the reins in Tilghman's hands and drew them with such frenzy that the horses, as they came to Meshach Milburn's store, were pulled into the open area before it, where something in their surprise or lying on the ground gave them immediate fright, and they dashed at a gallop into Front Street, the wheels passing over an object by the old storehouse that nearly upset the carriage.
The street they took for their run crossed a small arm of the Manokin, and led up to a gentleman's gate; but before this brook was crossed Tilghman, an experienced horseman and driver, had reined the flying animals into a nearly unoccupied street, called Back Alley, parallel with the main street of Princess Anne, but hidden from it by houses and gardens, and almost in a moment of time the whole town had been cleared, with hardly a person in it aware of such a vehicle going past.
It was a real runaway, but Tilghman, in a cool, gentle voice, like a brook's music, told the girls to sit perfectly still, as they had a clear, level road; and, seeing that he could not stop the animals by any mere exercise of strength, without danger to his harness, he waited for their power to wear out, or their fears to subside.
Rhoda Holland was ashamed to scream, if her pride was not too well aroused already in the presence of the muscular young minister, sitting there like an artillery teamster driving into battle, and his nostrils and jaws delineated in the gray air, expressed almost the joy he had long put by of following the hounds in the autumn fox-hunts, where Judge Custis said he had been the perfect pattern of a rider.
As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving behind the bloody hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was herself alone, dashing at that frightful pace to destruction, until the young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions and kissed the slave girl pityingly.
Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands several miles east of Princess Anne.
"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is nobody knows whar, now. This yer Allan McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."