“No; think he is perhaps the cheapest nigger that was ever bought.”

To put any more questions would have been impertinent, and I possessed my curiosity in silence till we reached the plantation.

Here Moore’s conduct became decidedly eccentric.  He had the black man conveyed at once into a cool, dark, strong room with a heavy iron door, where the new acquisition was locked up in company with a sufficient meal.  Moore and I dined hastily, and then he summoned all his negroes together into the court of the house.  “Look here, boys,” he cried:  “all these trees”—­and he pointed to several clumps “must come down immediately, and all the shrubs on the lawn and in the garden.  Fall to at once, those of you that have axes, and let the rest take hoes and knives and make a clean sweep of the shrubs.”  The idea of wholesale destruction seemed not disagreeable to the slaves, who went at their work with eagerness, though it made my heart ache to see the fine old oaks beginning to fall and to watch the green garden becoming a desert.  Moore first busied himself with directing the women, who, under his orders, piled up mattresses and bags of cotton against the parapets of the verandahs.  The house stood on the summit of a gradually sloping height, and before the moon began to set (for we worked without intermission through the evening and far into the night) there was nothing but a bare slope of grass all round the place, while smoke and flame went up from the piles of fallen timber.  The plantation, in fact, was ready to stand a short siege.

Moore now produced a number of rifles, which he put, with ammunition, into the hands of some of the more stalwart negroes.  These he sent to their cabins, which lay at a distance of about a furlong and a half on various sides of the house.  The men had orders to fire on any advancing enemy, and then to fall back at once on the main building, which was now barricaded and fortified.  One lad was told to lurk in a thicket below the slope of the hill and invisible from the house.

“If Wild Bill’s men come on, and you give them the slip, cry thrice like the ‘Bob White,’” said Moore; “if they take you, cry once.  If you get off, run straight to Clayville, and give this note to the officer commanding the cavalry.”

The hour was now about one in the morning; by three the dawn would begin.  In spite of his fatigues, Moore had no idea of snatching an hour’s rest.  He called up Peter (who had been sleeping, coiled up like a black cat, in the smoking-room), and bade him take a bath and hot water into the room where Gumbo, the newly purchased black, had all this time been left to his own reflections.  “Soap him and lather him well, Peter,” said Moore; “wash him white, if you can, and let me know when he’s fit to come near.”

Peter withdrew with his stereotyped grin to make his preparations.

Presently, through the open door of the smoking-room, we heard the sounds of energetic splashings, mingled with the inarticulate groans of the miserable Gumbo.  Moore could not sit still, but kept pacing the room, smoking fiercely.  Presently Peter came to the door—­