“Make them what you will, and But, alas! where shall I find means to repay you?  I who am robbed of everything?”

“Didn’t I say I could help you to the major’s lands and houses? and a’n’t they a fortun’ for an emperor?”

“You! you help me? help me to them?”

“Captain,” said the renegade, with sundry emphatic nods of the head, “I’m a sight more of a rascal than you ever dreamed on! and this snapping of you up by Injun deviltry, that you think so hard of, is but a small part of my misdoings:  I’ve been slaving agin you this sixteen years, more of less, slaving (that’s the word, for I made a niggur of myself) to rob you of these here very lands that I’m now thinking of helping you to!  You don’t believe me, captain!  Well, did you ever hear of a certain honest feller of old Augusta, called John Atkinson?”

“Hah!” cried the soldier, looking with new eyes upon the renegade; “you are then the fellow upon whose perjured testimony Braxley relied to sustain his frauds?”

“The identical same man, John Atkinson, or Jack, as they used to call me; but now Abel Doe, for convenience sake,” said the refugee, with great composure; “and so, now, you can see into the whole matter.  It was me that had the keeping of the major’s daughter that you knows of.  Well, I was an honest feller in them days, I was, captain, by G——!” repeated the fellow with something that sounded like remorseful utterance, “and jist as contented in my cabin on the mountain as the old major himself in his big house at Felhallow.  But Dick Braxley came, d—­n him, and there was an end of all honest doings:  for Dick was high with the old major, and the major was agin his brothers; and says Dick, says he, ’Put but this little gal,’—­meaning the major’s daughter,—­’out of the way and I’m jist as good as the major’s heir; and I’ll make your fortun’”—­

“Ay! and it was he then, the villain himself,” cried Roland, “who devised this horrible iniquity, which, by innuendo at least, he charged upon my father!—­You are a rascal indeed!  And you murdered the poor child?”

“Murdered!  No, rat it, there was no murdering in the case:  it was jist hiding in a hole, as you may call it.  We burned down the wigwam, and made on as if the gal was burned in it; and then I stumped off to the Injun border, among them that didn’t know me, and according to Dick’s advice, helped myself to another name, and jist passed off the gal for my own daughter.”

“Your own daughter!” cried Roland, starting half up, but being unable to rise on account of his bonds:  “the story then is true! and Telie Doe is my uncle’s child, the lost heiress?”

“Well, supposing she is?” said Atkinson, “I reckon you’d not be exactly the man to help her to her rights?”

“Ay, by Heaven, but I would though!” said Roland, “if rights they be.  If my uncle, upon knowledge that she was still alive, thought fit to alter his intentions with regard to Edith and myself, he would have found none more ready to acknowledge the poor girl’s claims than ourselves, none more ready to befriend and assist her.”