New York was the prey of confusion. It was the prey of panic. The people were a-shiver like the leaves of the poplars that lined Broadway. The great street was paved all the way now to the farmsteads out at Twenty-third Street. The shops crowding in from Pearl Street had begun to pursue the homes. Broadway was ceasing to be a lane of homes. But the cholera was faster and fiercer than commerce. It had turned Broadway into a channel of escape. It was all fugitive with citizens fleeing from this new Pompeii whose fires were from within, whose lava seethed in the loins of its people. Half the people—a hundred thousand fled. The swine that had kept the roadway clean were frightened into the byways by the frightened men and women. The cattle droves that had gone lowing along Broadway in hundreds were thrust aside by the human herds; and their dusty wardens cursed the plague. The street was full of funerals, lone paupers in carts, merchants with retinues of mourners on foot, moving slowly up to the burial ground for plague victims in Washington Square. Only men, of course, went to the funerals, but women joined the flight. The quick crowded the dead into the flushed gutters, and the hackney coaches, the heavy busses, the light wagons from Ford, the four-horse stages, the Tilburys, chairs, gigs, and phaetons were hurried north in a jumble of wagons and drays filled with baggage and household effects, as well as wives and children. The city was moving once more out to Chelsea and other rural retreats. A hotel of pine boards had been run up in a Greenwich wheatfield in two days, and it held already five hundred exiles. But Greenwich was not far enough for RoBards and his precious bride. She had been too hardly won to be lightly risked. He had bought the two bays and the Godwin carriage for the escape, and when he checked his horses under the tree before her home in Park Place, she was waiting on the step. He had sent ahead his man, Cuff, and her woman, Teen—both of them manumitted only five years before by the New York emancipation law of 1827, both still and forever slaves at heart. They were to prepare his house in the country for the honeymoon. It was up in Westchester, beyond White Plains, near Robbin’s Mills. The stage could have carried the bride and groom, but it was booked for days ahead. So now he helped her in and bestowed her packages. For all his fear, it was wonderful to feel the exquisite elbow of pretty Patty Jessamine in his palm, and to know that henceforth she was Mistress David RoBards. He wished that the crowd of young and old bucks who had besought her in marriage since she was fifteen, might have been drawn up in review along Broadway to see him carry her off. Most of all he wished that Harry Chalender might have witnessed his triumph, for he had dreaded Chalender so much among his rivals that he was still surprised at his success. He wondered a little that Chalender had made no resistance to his conquest.