"Yes, all the negroes on the Lawless', Skinner's, and Lomas's plantations have gone. Butler has declared them contrabands of war, and a lot of Yankee speculators have been sneaking through the plantations, filling their ignorant minds with promises of freedom, a farm, and a share of their masters' property. Their real purpose is to get the negroes and hold them until the two governments come to terms, and then they will get rewards for every nigger they hold. Oh, these Yankees can see ways of making money through a stone-wall," and Vincent laughed lightly, as though the incident in no way concerned him. "Captain Cram, who is in camp just below in the oak clearing, is ordered to scour the river-bank to the enemy's lines near Hampton, so we need have no fear of these enterprising apostles of freedom interfering with our niggers." "I don't think one of them could be induced to leave us if offered all our farms," Mrs. Atterbury said, a little proudly. "There isn't one of them that I haven't brought through sickness or trouble of one sort or another, and there isn't one that wouldn't take my command before the gold of a stranger." "I don't know, Mrs. Atterbury," Mrs. Sprague ventured, mildly. "Gold is a mighty weight in an argument. I have known it to change the convictions of a lifetime in a moment. I have known it to make a man renounce his father, dishonor his name, belie his whole life, deny his family." "When a fortune beyond reasonable dreams was placed upon the head of Charles Stuart, for whom our ancestors fought and beggared themselves, his secret was in the keeping of scores of peasants, and the blood-money lay idle. I could cite hundreds of similar proofs, that gold is not God everywhere. I mean no offense, but you will agree with me that you Northern people are given up to the getting and worship of money. It is not so with us. Perhaps because we have it, and with it something that makes it secondary--birth. I have no fear of the infidelity of any of my people. I would as soon doubt Rosa or Vincent us the smallest black on my estate." She spoke with mild, high-bred dignity, not a particle of assertion or captious intolerance, but as a prelate might assert the majesty of the word on the altar, neither looking for dissent nor dreaming that the spirit of it could exist. "I'm glad to hear your mother express such confidence, Vint," Jack said as they walked out on the veranda to take a good-night smoke; "but just let me give you a maxim of my own, the lock's not sure unless the key is in your pocket." "Sententious, my boy, but vague. My mother is perfectly right. Our niggers are fidelity itself. But since we are so near the Butler lines, where his agents can sneak up on the river and kidnap the new sort of contraband, I think it better to take some precaution. Hereafter General Magruder will have a picket post within two miles of us, between here and the creek, which offers a convenient point for smuggling."