"I ain't hardly got the time. I got to git away from hyeah." But the smell of the new baked biscuits was in his nostrils and he could not resist the temptation to sit down. He was eating hastily, but with appreciation, when the door opened and two minions of the law entered.
Buford sprang up and turned to flee, but at the back door, her large form a towering and impassive barrier, stood Aunt Dicey.
"Oh, don't hu'y, Brothah Buford," she said calmly, "set down an' he'p yo'se'f. Dese hyeah's my friends."
It was the next day that Robert Fairfax saw him in his cell. The man's face was ashen with coward's terror. He was like a caught rat though, bitingly on the defensive.
"You see we've got you, Buford," said Fairfax coldly to him. "It is as well to confess."
"I ain't got nothin' to say," said Buford cautiously.
"You will have something to say later on unless you say it now. I don't want to intimidate you, but Aunt Dicey's word will be taken in any court in the United States against yours, and I see a few years hard labour for you between good stout walls."
The little promoter showed his teeth in an impotent snarl. "What do you want me to do?" he asked, weakening.
"First, I want you to give back every cent of the money that you got out of Dicey Fairfax. Second, I want you to give up to every one of those Negroes that you have cheated every cent of the property you have accumulated by fraudulent means. Third, I want you to leave this place, and never come back so long as God leaves breath in your dirty body. If you do this, I will save you—you are not worth the saving—from the pen or worse. If you don't, I will make this place so hot for you that hell will seem like an icebox beside it."