"Toby, you black devil, where have you been?" This was Lysander's chivalrous way of addressing an inferior whom he wished to terrify.
Now, if there was a person in the world whom Toby detested, it was this roving Lysander, who had disgraced the Villars family by marrying into it. However, he concealed his contempt with a politic hypocrisy worthy of a whiter skin.
"Please, sar," said the old negro, cap in hand, "I'se been lookin' for my ol' massa and my young missis."
"Well, what luck, you lying scoundrel?"
"O, no luck 't all, I 'sure you, sar!"
"What! couldn't you find 'em? Don't you lie, you ——." (We may as well omit the captain's energetic epithets.)
"O, sar!"—Toby looked up earnestly with counterfeit grief in his wrinkled old face,—"dey ain't nowhars on de face ob de 'arth!"
"Not on the face of the earth!"
"If dey is, den de fire's done burnt 'em all up. I seen, down in a big holler, a place whar somebody's been burnt, shore! Dar's a man, and a hoss on top on him, and de hoss's har am all burnt off, and de man's trouse's-legs am all burnt off too, and one foot's got a fried boot onto it, and tudder han't got nuffin' on, but jes' de skin and bone all roasted to a crisp; and I 'specs dar's 'nuff sight more dead folks down in dar, on'y I didn't da's to look, it make me feel so skeerylike!"
All which, and much more, Toby related so circumstantially, that Captain Sprowl was strongly impressed with the truth of the story. Great, therefore, was the joy of the captain. Perhaps the patriots had been destroyed: he hoped so! Still more ardently he hoped that Virginia had perished with her father. For was he not the husband of Salina? and the snug little Villars property, did he not covet it?