"So you took her——?"
"For my maid, yes—on wages, of course—down to New Orleans—we were bound there—and kept her when we went North and ever since."
"And she's always been——?"
"Well-behaved, faithful, kind, and wise. That one terrible deed, which she says you know all about——"
"I do."
"It seemed to change the very foundations of her character, to convert her soul."
"Yes," said Hugh, as if speaking from experience.
"Yet she kept her high spirit. She would never put on a disguise. And really that was safest since she wasn't being looked for by any one. 'I'm no advertised runaway,' she said. Still she's never been foolhardy. She'd never have come—we'd never have brought her—aboard this boat could we have foreseen the mishap to her captain which decided you and your father and grandfather to come on her."
So ran the story hurriedly, but before it had got thus far Hugh's attention, in spite of him, was divided. It was wise, we have implied, for Ramsey to take the exhorter while he was in a manageable humor. He had come to the roof with an improved regard, got by his fall in the cabin, for the "'Piscopalian play-actoh," and with brute shrewdness was glad to make an outward show of good-will to Gilmore, and accepted with avidity every pretty advance of Gid Hayle's "bodacious brick-top gal." Hugh could hear him answering Ramsey's inquiries regarding various pieces of river seen or unseen during the day.
"Spanish-moss Ben'? Why, they calls it that by reason 'at when we-all used to come down the riveh in flatboats, that's whah we al'ays fus' see the moss a-swingin' f'om the trees. Yass, sawt o' like scalps f'om wigwam poles. An' that ho'pe us to know whah'bouts we 'uz at. We knowed we 'uz at Spanish-moss Ben'. Didn' we, Mr. play-actoh?"