About this time the boys dismounted in front of Mrs. Brown's humble abode--a small log-cabin which Beardsley had built for her in the edge of a briar patch on his own plantation. That was the only neighborly act that anybody ever knew the captain to be guilty of; but then it was not entirely unselfish on his part. Beardsley received important letters now and then. He was not good at reading all sorts of writing, and when he came upon a sentence that he could not master, it was little trouble for him to run over to Mrs. Brown's cabin and ask her to decipher it for him. And--it is a remarkable thing to tell, but it is the truth--the contents of those letters were safe with Mrs. Brown. She would tell any and every thing else that came to her knowledge, no matter how it might hurt somebody, but who Beardsley's correspondents were and what they wrote about, no one could learn from her. Having sheltered their horses in some fashion behind the cabin, the boys opened the door without knocking, and went in. There were two persons in the single room the cabin contained--a little, dried-up woman who sat in a low rocking-chair in front of the fire with a dingy snuff-stick between her toothless gums, and one of Beardsley's negro girls who had come over to "slick up things." "How do you find yourself this fine morning, mother?" said Tom familiarly. "We thought we would drop in to warm by your comfortable blaze, and see if you are in need of any little things we can get for you. By the way," he added, putting his hand into his pocket, "it's a long time since I gave anything toward buying a jar of snuff. Take that till I come again." "I see the captain has returned; and quite unexpectedly, too, I am told," said Mark, pulling off his dripping overcoat and hanging it upon a wooden peg in the chimney-corner. "I wish he might find the man who wrote him that threatening letter and broke up his business. I am sure he would make it warm for him." "Every one of them triflin' hounds had oughter have a hickory wore out on their bare backs," said the old woman, in tones which sounded so nearly like the snarl of some wild animal that Tom Allison shuddered, although he had often heard her speak that way before. "Do you know who they are?" "Of course she knows who they are," exclaimed Mark. "The question is, is she at liberty to tell." "Mebbe I know, an' mebbe I don't," said the woman, with a contortion of her wrinkled face that was intended for a wink and a smile. "I aint one of them folks who tells all they know. I am a master-hand to keep things to myself when they are told to me for a secret."