AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.
Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited, though she had not revealed them—her modesty having received a stab that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter—Vesta fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.
Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry and heartless.
"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my father's."
Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from the slave-pen.
"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"
She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the jail.
"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."
"Three men, one old woman, and some little things, makes the present contents of Pangymonum," spoke up a rough, cheery voice, "an', by smoke! it's jess enough."
"Is it the white man that talks?"