“What I've got to say to you.” She looked at him suddenly. Then she said, with a disdainful glance around her: “I see I am helpless here, and--thanks to your trickery--alone. Have a care, sir; I warn you that you will have to answer to Major Randolph for any insolence.” “I reckon you won't tell Major Randolph what I have to say to you,” he returned coolly. Her lips were nearly a grayish hue, but she said scornfully: “And why not? Do you know who you are talking to?” The man came lazily forward to the carryall, carelessly brushed aside the slack reins, and resting his elbows on the horse's back, laid his chin on his hands, as he looked up in the woman's face. “Yes; I know who I'm talking to,” he said coolly. “But as the major don't, I reckon you won't tell him.” “Stand away from that horse!” she said, her whole face taking the grayish color of her lips, but her black eyes growing smaller and brighter. “Hand me those reins, and let me pass! What canaille are you to stop me?” “I thought so,” returned the man, without altering his position; “you don't know ME. You never saw ME before. Well, I'm Jim Dawson, the nephew of L'Hommadieu, YOUR OLD MASTER!” She gripped the iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that seemed stamped there. It was remarkable that with that smile she flung away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face appeared to have changed. “I don't say,” continued the man quietly, “that he didn't MARRY you before he died. But you know as well as I do that the laws of his State didn't recognize the marriage of a master with his octoroon slave! And you know as well as I do that even if he had freed you, he couldn't change your blood. Why, if I'd been willing to stay at Avoyelles to be a nigger-driver like him, the plantation of 'de Fontanges'--whose name you have taken--would have been left to me. If YOU had stayed there, you might have been my property instead of YOUR owning a square man like Randolph. You didn't think of that when you came here, did you?” he said composedly. “Oh, mon Dieu!” she said, dropping rapidly into a different accent, with her white teeth and fixed mirthless smile, “so it is a claim for PROPERTY, eh? You're wanting money--you? Tres bien, you forget we are in California, where one does not own a slave. And you have a fine story there, my poor friend. Very pretty, but very hard to prove, m'sieu. And these peasants are in it, eh, working it on shares like the farm, eh?”