That was old Cap'n Jasper's way. His mind was laden like Aladdin's sumter-mule, with treasures uncountable, and often he would drop some such glittering jewel as this and leave it and go on. I mind now how many times he started to tell me the full story of the two dissolute Virginians, nephews of one of the first Presidents, who in a fit of drunken temper killed their slave boy George, on the very night that the great Earthquake of 1811 came--and taking the agues and the crackings of the earth for a judgment of God upon their heads, went half mad with terror and ran to give themselves up. But I never did find out, and I don't know yet what happened to them after that. Nor was I ever to hear from Cap'n Jasper the fuller and gory details of the timely taking-off of Big Harp and little Harp. He just gave me this one taste of the delightful horror of it and went on. “Some of them said that Harve Allen had belonged to the Ford's Ferry gang and that he'd got away when the others were trapped. For a fact he did come down the river right after the massacre at the cave, and maybe that was how the story started. But as for myself, I never believed that part of it at all. Spite of his meanness, Harve Allen wasn't the murdering kind and it must have taken a mighty seasoned murderer to keep steady company with Big Harp and Little Harp. “But he looked mean enough for anything--just the way he would look at a man won half his fights for him. It's rising of sixty years since I saw him, but I can shut my eyes and the picture of him comes back to me plain as a painted portrait on a wall. I can see him now, rising of six feet-three, as I told you, and long-legged and raw-boned. He didn't have any beard on his face--he'd pulled it out the same as the Indian bucks used to do, only they'd use mussel shells, and he used tweezers, but there were a few hairs left in his chin that were black and stiff and stood out like the bristles on a hog's jowl. And his under lip lolled down as though it'd been sagged out of plumb by the weight of all the cuss-words that Harve had sworn in his time, and his eyes were as cold and mean as a catfish's eyes. He used to wear an old deer skin hunting vest, and it was gormed and smeared with grease until it was as slick as an otter-slide; and most of the time he went bare foot. The bottoms of his feet were like horn.