"Good job!" Henley chuckled. "Sam's a hard nut to crack."
Dixie raised her long lashes in a steady stare at him. "Guess what I've been doing at the court-house," she said. "I've been engaged in an odd thing for this modern day of enlightenment. Maybe you think slavery is over—maybe you think the Yankees wiped it clean out forty years ago, but they didn't. I've turned the wheels of Time back. I laid down the cash and bought a real live slave to-day. I didn't have to dig up as much as two thousand, which, I understand, was the old price for stout, able-bodied, hard workers, for the one I bought was a little sick one. Alfred, I actually bought little Joe to-day. I paid Sam Pitman twenty-five dollars to get him to release all his claims without any rumpus. I've adopted him. Judge Barton has fixed up the papers good and stout, and says nothing can take him from me as long as I do my part by him. Alfred, I'm so happy that I want to shout at the top of my lungs."
"You have adopted him!" Henley exclaimed, in wondering surprise. "Well, well, what won't you do next? Of all the things on earth this knocks me off my feet, and you already loaded down with responsibilities!"
"I don't care," Dixie laughed. "I'd welcome more like that, and never complain. You ought to have seen Joe when I told him Sam had agreed to let him go, and that I was to be his mother. If you could have seen the angelic look on that thin, white face you would have known that life is eternal, and that the spirit is all there is to anything. He stared straight at me with his pale brow wrinkled as if it was too good to be so, and then when I convinced him, he put his arms around my neck and hugged me tight, and sobbed and sobbed in pure joy."
Dixie was shedding tears herself now, and, with a heaving breast and lowered head, she walked along beside her awed and silent companion. They had entered a wood through which the road passed, and there seemed to be a hallowed stillness in the cool, grayish touch of the coming night that pervaded the boughs and foliage of the trees. Beyond the wood a mountain-peak rose in a blaze of molten gold from the oblique rays of the setting sun, but here the night-dews were beginning to fall and the chirping insects of the dark were waking. In the marshy spots frogs were croaking and snarling, and fireflies were cutting, to their kind perhaps readable, hieroglyphics on the leafy background. Presently she wiped her eyes, and smiled up at him.
"What a goose I am!" she said. "As old as I am, I'll cry if you crook your finger at me. You went to Carlton yesterday, didn't you?"
"Yes," he replied, glad to see her emotion over, uplifting and rare as its nature was.
"Did you happen to see my young man?" A smile he failed to see in the shadows was playing sly tricks with her lineaments.
"Your young man? You mean—"
"You know who I mean. I mean my beau—Mr. Jasper Long, Esquire, merchant, cotton-handler, and rich capitalist."