“By gracious!” cried Healy, slapping his thigh, “if she hasn’t hit it!” We looked at him inquiringly; he dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Come up here,” and he started, dragging Mrs. Judge Pennoyer by one hand up the new gravel slope beside the line. Raoul followed, with Miss May; he had been very silent that morning; and I with Miss Jeanie. Her little foot was buried at once in the sliding gravel, over the dainty low shoe; I wanted to carry her up, had only propriety sanctioned it. At the top, Healy swept the horizon as if for spies; then bending over us, all in a close group, he said: “Them ain’t real niggers--them’s United States revenue officers from New Orleans, under General McBride.” “General McBride?” “He’s in hidin’ in my hut. He wouldn’t black up. But them deputy-marshals thought it was a spree. We had to do it. Every Saturday the niggers are paid off--one dollar and fifty cents a day, nigh on to ten dollars apiece--an’ then King Kelly he’d come down from his stills in the mountain, with his men loaded with casks o’ pine-top, warranted to kill--an’ by sundown eighteen hundred niggers would be blind-drunk, an’ fit for shootin’. On last Sunday we lost sixty-two hands. An’ the head contractor, he swore nigh to lift yer ha’r off.” “Sixty-two men killed?” cried Jeanie, in horror. “Some killed, some wounded; but it tells on the contract just the same. Why, you could have heared ’em poppin’ all over camp.” The Higginbothams had always been abolitionists; and I felt my ancestors turn in their complacent graves. “Expect to get Kelly this time?” said Coe. “Dunno, we’ll see at twelve o’clock, when they’re paid off. It’ll be quite a thing to see, all the same. But the ladies had better stay in their tent. An’ it’s eleven now, so I reckon we’ll go back to camp. See, there go the marshals.” When we got back to camp Raoul received a telegram. He read it hastily, and crumpled it into his pocket; but, I thought, looked troubled. Jeanie and I wandered down by the brook side before dinner, and afterward Raoul, Healy, Coe, and I sallied forth to “see the fun.” We were let into the chief commissary’s hut, the front of which, above a strong wooden bar, was open; and before it a great crowd of negroes, singing and dancing, and a hundred others, in a long queue, waiting for their pay. “You kin lie down on the floor ef they git to shootin’,” said General McBride, whom we found there smoking placidly in a cane-seated chair. “Those revolvers won’t carry through the boards.”