"Ah! now we have it--when Miss Worth mentioned him, telling me things about him as you had told her, I would always say that he is the same old Slab--and I'll bet the best horse I've got that he is the same. He belonged to my uncle who lived on the plantation adjoining my father's. Slab was asleep in the shade of a porch one day when I, a boy of seven years, meaning to startle him, slipped up and held a snapping turtle close to his face. When I started to arouse him with one hand, the turtle suddenly shot his neck out and gabbed old Slab by the ear. Then Slab woke up. You ask him about that; and you ask him if he remembers the time old Hickamohawk ran away with him--and you bring him down here with you. Just tell him that Amos Tennytown wants him and he'll come--bring the whole family--there's room for us all, Belle-Ann." She had listened to his warm-hearted suggestions with growing enthusiasm that sent her blood bounding, as she pictured the surprise and gladness the Colonel's message would inspire in those lonely, isolated hearts up on Hellsfork. "Grandpa," observed the girl, out of her unutterable joy and gratitude, "God made your heart awful big." "And God made you the gentlest and most beautiful of all granddaughters, my dear," he answered gallantly. "Monday I will have here the best single-foot saddle beast in this country for you to ride, and I will send a man to escort you, who will guarantee your safety." "Oh, Grandpa! I don't wish him to go any further than Boon's Ford. He can turn back thah. I feel sure Lem and Buddy and Slab will come back with me." "Just as you will, Belle-Ann," he agreed, and the two mingled their mutual, uncontrollable outbursts of ecstasy as they joined the figure lingering amid the mystic vacillating shadows of the rose-tree. CHAPTER XXIX THE RED DEBT All through these wretched months, Lem Lutts had weltered in jail. During the first hideous weeks of his incarceration he thought his reason would not serve him longer. He felt that he would surely go mad. Night after night he stood with dull, hopeless eyes at his cell door, his fingers twined around the mercilessly cold iron bars, gazing across the dim corridor at the blank stone wall. When "Creeping Jesus" glided up to his cell door like a phantom, and flashed his lantern upon Lem, he found him hour after hour wide awake, his eyes burning and starry with the unquenchable fire of a throbbing, wild, mad unrest. The keepers wondered how he kept alive, considering the amount of food he took and the sleep he had. Belle-Ann's face was ever before him. Her beautiful vision floated evermore through the dark confines of his cell. Many times he had scribbled letters to Belle-Ann, with fond hopes that some word from her would come back to him, not knowing that these missives had never reached the outside of the jail.