Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we give a few lines to one matter.
Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey’s end; she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. —— ’s “hotel,” at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a man on horseback met them, and, in passing, raised his hat to Mary. The act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled, disconcerted, and had to ask the unobservant, loquacious driver to repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look brightened his face.
“It’s all fixed,” he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” she replied.
The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance full of humor.
“Hold on. It’s still my deal. This is the last time, and then I’m done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to do a thing, do it. Them’s the words that’s inscribed on my banner, as the felleh says; only I, Sam, aint got much banner. And if I sort o’ use about this low country a little while for my health, as it were, and nibble around sort o’ pro bono pūblico takin’ notes, why you aint a-carin’, is you? For wherefore shouldest thou?” He put on a yet more ludicrous look, and spread his hand off at one side, working his outstretched fingers.
“Yes,” responded Mary, with severe gravity; “I must care. You did finish at Holly Springs. I was to find the rest of the way as best I could. That was the understanding. Go away!” She made a commanding gesture, though she wore a pleading look. He looked grave; but his habitual grimace stole through his gravity and invited her smile. But she remained fixed. He gathered the rein and straightened up in the saddle.
“Yes,” she insisted, answering his inquiring attitude; “go! I shall be grateful to you as long as I live. It wasn’t because I mistrusted you that I refused your aid at Camp Moore or at——that other place on this side. I don’t mistrust you. But don’t you see—you must see—it’s your duty to see—that this staying and—and—foll—following—is—is—wrong.” She stood, holding her skirt in one hand, and Alice’s hand in the other, not upright, but in a slightly shrinking attitude, and as she added once more, “Go! I implore you—go!” her eyes filled.
“I will; I’ll go,” said the man, with a soft chuckle intended for self-abasement. “I go, thou goest, he goes. ‘I’ll skedaddle,’ as the felleh says. And yit it do seem to me sorter like,—if my moral sense is worthy of any consideration, which is doubtful, may be,—seems to me like it’s sort o’ jumpin’ the bounty for you to go and go back on an arrangement that’s been all fixed up nice and tight, and when it’s on’y jess to sort o’ ’jump into the wagon’ that’s to call for you to-morrow, sun-up, drove by a nigger boy, and ride a few mile’ to a house on the bayou, and wait there till a man comes with a nice little schooner, and take you on bode and sail off, and ‘good-by, Sally,’ and me never in sight from fust to last, ‘and no questions axed.’”
“I don’t reject the arrangement,” replied Mary, with tearful pleasantness. “If you’ll do as I say, I’ll do as you say; and that will be final proof to you that I believe you’re”—she fell back a step, laughingly—“‘the clean sand!’” She thought the man would have perpetrated some small antic; but he did not. He did not even smile, but lifted the rein a little till the horse stepped forward, and, putting out his hand, said:—