Westlake told it eagerly. He was to save his authority with his people and his reputation with his neighbors by selling the rebellious servant,--that is to say, by pretending to sell him. Senator was to entitle himself to a commutation of his sentence into simple banishment by lending himself to the pious fraud and acting his part in it becomingly. Westlake had been so long accustomed to smooth his path of life by open subterfuges and falsehoods whose only guilt was in intention, that he had formed a very high opinion of his own address, and a very low one of the penetration of the rest of the world. As he proceeded with the details of his plot, childishly ingenious and childishly transparent, Senator listened, at first with attention, then with impatience, and at last not at all. When Westlake stopped to take breath, he interposed. "Now hear me. Order the long wagon out, with the roans. Have me handcuffed and fastened down in it. Tell those whom you trust that you are taking me to Goosefield." "To Goosefield?" "To Dick Norman." "Dick Norman! He help you! He is not an ----?" Westlake could not bring himself to associate the word abolitionist with a man who had dined with him three days before. "He is a slave-trader." The blood, which had rushed furiously to the proud planter's cheeks, left them with a sudden revulsion. To be taken in by a disguised fanatic might happen to any man too honorable to be suspicious. He could have forgiven himself. But to have held a slave-trader by the hand! to have asked him to his table! Westlake knew that Senator never said anything that had to be taken back. Richard Norman was a man of name and birth from old Virginia. Of easy fortune, so it was reported, still unmarried, he spent a great part of the year in travelling; and especially found pleasure in renewing old family ties with Virginian emigrants or their children in newer States. When he favored our neighborhood, he had his quarters at Goosefield, where he always took the same apartments in the house of a man, also Virginian by birth, who was said to be an old retainer of his family. Norman's father had been the fathers' friend of most of our principal planters. He was welcome in almost every household for the sake of these old memories, and apparently for his own. He was well-looking, well-mannered, possessed of various information, ready with amusing anecdote. And yet all the time it was perfectly known to every slave on every plantation where he visited what Mr. Richard Norman was. It was perfectly known to every planter except Westlake, and possibly Harvey. I do not remember to have heard of him at Harvey's. Those who never sold their servants, those who never separated families, those who never parted very young children from their mothers, found Norman a resource in those cases of necessity which exempt from law.