“Lord, Hugh, how lonesome I do feel without that money,” he said drearily, lighting his candle one night.
“But you have got the land free of all encumbrance, Colonel,--dead to rights,--within two miles of the town, right out there in the night.”
“It is a cold night and dark,” said the Colonel, toying with the snuffers. “It seems cruel to leave it there, bare and bleak, with no sort of a little old mortgage to cover it.”
But then he laughed and took himself upstairs to his rest.
A similar application of funds betided his later shipments of bales, the receipts from which were formerly wont to vanish in driblets he hardly knew how.
“Hugh, this way of paying debts that I thought would last through my time and be discharged by my executors almost takes my breath away,” he said half jocosely, half upbraiding. “You scarcely leave me a dollar for myself,--to buy me a little ‘baccy.’” And then they both laughed.
In the forty years of Hugh Treherne’s incarceration such independent means as he had possessed had barely sufficed for his maintenance at the sanatorium, constantly dwindling until now becoming inadequate for that purpose. His relatives greatly disapproved of the course that events had taken and were also solicitous for his safety while at large and the possibility of injury to others at his hands. One of them, a man of ample fortune, by way of coercing acquiescence in their views, notified Colonel Kenwynton that they would not be responsible for any expenses which Captain Treherne might incur during his absence from the asylum, where he had been placed with the sanction of his kindred, and where the writer of this communication was prepared to defray all the costs of his sojourn and treatment. Colonel Kenwynton, in a letter as formal and courteous as a cartel and as smoothly fierce, expressed his ignorance that any moneys had been asked of Captain Treherne’s relatives, and begged to know when and by whom such requests had been made. Then a significant silence settled on the subject.
The old Colonel felt that he had routed the enemy, but Hugh Treherne, to whom he detailed the circumstances, for he treated his friend in every respect as a sane man and kept nothing from him, did not share his host’s elation. A deep gloom descended upon his spirits and a furtive apprehension looked out of his eyes. He cautiously scanned the personnel of every approach to the house before he ventured to appear and greet the newcomers, and in his small interests about the place he kept within close reach of refuge. The negroes began to notice that he discontinued his supervisory errands to the fields where the picking of cotton was still in progress and where he had shown himself exceedingly suspicious of the accounts of the weigher and the bulk of the cotton delivered as compared with the distribution of the money furnished by Colonel Kenwynton for paying the cotton pickers. “The ole Cunnel’s crap will sho’ly turn out fur all hit is worf’ dis time,” the grinning darkeys were in the habit of commenting.