“Queer, too, the fellow from San Antonio! Wonder who and what’s brought him? Somebody’s promised him his costs?
“Damn ’em! I don’t care, not the value of a red cent. They can make nothing out of it, but that Gerald did the deed. Everything points that way; and everybody thinks so. They’re bound to convict him.
“Zeb Stump don’t think it, the suspicious old snake! He’s nowhere to be found. Wonder where he has gone? On a hunt, they say. ’Tain’t likely, such time as this. What if he be hunting it? What if he should catch it?
“I’d try again myself, if there was time. There ain’t. Before to-morrow night it’ll be all over; and afterwards if there should turn up—. Damn afterwards! The thing is to make sure now. Let the future look to itself. With one man hung for the murder, ’tain’t likely they’d care to accuse another. Even if something suspicious did turn up! they’d be shy to take hold of it. It would be like condemning themselves!
“I reckon, I’ve got all right with the Regulators. Sam Manley himself appears pretty well convinced. I knocked his doubts upon the head, when I told him what I’d heard that night. A little more than I did hear; though that was enough to make a man stark, staring mad. Damn!
“It’s no use crying over spilt milk. She’s met the man, and there’s an end of it. She’ll never meet him again, and that’s another end of it—except she meet him in heaven. Well; that will depend upon herself.
“I don’t think anything has happened between them. She’s not the sort for that, with all her wildness; and it may be what that yellow wench tells me—only gratitude. No, no, no! It can’t be. Gratitude don’t get out of its bed in the middle of the night—to keep appointments at the bottom of a garden? She loves him—she loves him! Let her love and be damned! She shall never have him. She shall never see him again, unless she prove obstinate; and then it will be but to condemn him. A word from her, and he’s a hanged man.
“She shall speak it, if she don’t say that other word, I’ve twice asked her for. The third time will be the last. One more refusal, and I show my hand. Not only shall this Irish adventurer meet his doom; but she shall be his condemner; and the plantation, house, niggers, everything—. Ah! uncle Woodley; I wanted to see you.”
The soliloquy above reported took place in a chamber, tenanted only by Cassius Calhoun.
It was Woodley Poindexter who interrupted it. Sad, silent, straying through the corridors of Casa del Corvo, he had entered the apartment usually occupied by his nephew—more by chance than from any premeditated purpose.