“As it happened, Johns’s opportunity did not come till the breath had left his enemy’s body. When it was known that the Misses Chester would be forced to part with all of their ‘likely’ black people, in order to pay the debts of the estate and live, the deepest feeling was everywhere shown for the pair. My own mother went a two days’ journey on horseback to weep with them. Remember, the oversupply of slaves in Virginia made their buyers very particular to select the best, and it was therefore much feared by the friends of the family that the first man to go off would be Leander Jameson.”
“His master’s friend—intimate! Oh, infamous! I would have starved first!” cried out Eunice, a red spot glowing in either cheek.
“God knows I think so, too, Miss Eunice,” said the old soldier, bowing his head sadly. “But that such things were was part of our burden and our curse.
“A number of us,” he went on presently, “old friends and neighbors, met together and made a purse to buy in Leander for the estate. But we were tricked—outbidden—overruled. The man who got him was, as you may surmise, none other than Israel Johns. We learned afterward that Johns said he would own that nigger if it took every cent he had. I can see him now, the dirty blackguard! A middle-sized, low-browed, swart, powerful fellow, dark as a Spaniard, with thick lips, curly black hair, and black, shifty eyes that couldn’t look you in the face. It was at the county court-house on New Year’s Day where the auction had taken place. When Leander found out who had become his owner his eyes glared like a savage animal’s. I never saw a handsome young face so transformed by rage and despair. A man who stood next to me said carelessly, ‘By Jove! it’s he that looks like the master, and Johns like the man, I am thinking.’
“I will pass over the feelings of all concerned when, in a few days, we heard that Johns had started for New Orleans to sell his prize to the highest bidder. I for one do not enjoy analyses of human emotion under stress. When you know that Chester had promised to free Leander in order to enable the fellow to go back and marry a Creole girl from Martinique whom he had met in Paris, and had died without doing so, you see how the affair stood. What followed is well known to many persons. Johns flaunted down to New Orleans with his chattel; and on the way Leander conceived one of the most daring schemes that was ever carried out to a successful ending. He managed to get his master drunk, and on arriving at New Orleans to actually sell him for a thousand dollars to a buyer before whom Leander had posed as a Virginian planter on his travels, encumbered with a tipsy ruffian he was glad to dispose of cheap.
“The complexion, good manners, educated voice, and easy diction of Leander made this thing possible. Upon receiving, as was agreed, the money down, he at once disappeared; and he has never been heard of since.”
“And Johns? What became of him?” asked the hearers in concert.
“When he came to himself and found out his condition he fought, blustered, was overcome and held in servitude. Finally the law allowed him to institute ‘a freedom suit’; and after many disappointments and delays he was identified as Israel Johns by persons sent from Virginia to New Orleans for that purpose, at Johns’s expense. By the time his freedom was secured and he was restored to his privileges as a white citizen, Leander Jameson was far beyond reach of his vengeance. But Johns’s spirit was broken, and a year later he died.”
“Is all that true?” asked Eunice Hall, who had listened in breathless interest.
“To the best of my belief, yes; you may see certainly that the tale is unvarnished by me. But as I told you, it was only the prelude to a personal experience of mine during the last six and thirty hours. When, night before last, I reached ‘Betsey’s Pride’ after a long day in the saddle, I was kindly greeted by the two little Miss Chesters, who continue to live there in the most frugal way. War, that left over their heads the shell of their father’s mansion, has left them but little else besides. My visit was, in rude fact, one of investigation—to see whether the two ladies were supplied with the necessaries of life, for which they are too proud to ask their friends. After a meal and a conversation that I can’t think of without a feeling like a knife thrust into the heart, they showed me to my room. It was, as I at once saw, the apartment in which their brother Llewellyn had breathed his last, a cold, bare place, the arrangement of its furniture unchanged in all these weary years. Through a crack widened around the window-frame ivy had shot into the room and was curling about the inner sash. The Miss Chesters could not bear to remove this vine. ‘It looked so sweet,’ they said, ‘growing in poor Llew’s room.’ An old negro woman, who brought me a jug of spring-water, hurried out as soon as she had deposited her burden. By the look in her face I knew she believed the place to contain another presence than my own.”