“I am very well, thank you, captain, and have just landed from the boat.  I hope you and your wife are quite well.”

“Robust, sir!  Robust!  So glad to see you!  But so sorry you did not arrive a few days sooner, so that we might have seen more of you.  You have come, I suppose, all this distance to bid a last, supplementary farewell to your dear favorite niece?”

“I have come to go with her to the frontier, if I may have the privilege of traveling with your trail of wagons.”

“Why, assuredly.  We are always glad of good company on the way,” heartily responded the captain.

“Oh, beg pardon, and thank you very much; but I did not intend to ‘beat’ my way.  Look there!” exclaimed Clarence, with a brighter smile, as he pointed to the commodious carriage, drawn by a pair of fine draught horses, that stood waiting for him, and to the covered wagon, drawn by a pair of stout mules, that was coming up behind.

“Oh!  Ah!  Yes, I see!  You are traveling with your retinue.  But is not this a very sudden move on your part?” demanded the captain.

“So sudden in its impulse that it might be mistaken for the flight of a criminal, had it not been so deliberate in its execution.  The fact is, sir, I am very much attached to my widowed niece, and not being able to dissuade her from her purpose of going out into the Indian country, and being her natural protector and an unincumbered bachelor, I decided to follow her.  And now I feel very happy to have overtaken her in the nick of time.”

“I see!  I see!” said the captain with a laugh.

While this talk was still going on, Corona turned to take a better look at the great, strong carriage in which her uncle had driven up from the steamboat landing.  There, to her surprise and delight, she saw young Mark, from Rockhold, seated on the box.  He was staring at her, trying to catch her eye, and when he did so he grinned and bobbed, and bobbed and grinned, half a dozen times, in as many half seconds.

“Why, Mark!  I am so surprised!” said Corona, as she went toward him.  “I am so glad to see you!”

“Yes’m.  Thanky’m.  So is I. Yes’m, an’dar’s mammy an’ daddy an’ Sister Phebe ’hind dar in de wagon,” jerking his head toward the rear.

Corona looked, and her heart leaped with joy to see the dear, familiar faces of the colored servants who had been about her from her childhood.  For there on the front seat of the wagon sat old John, from Rockhold, with the reins in his hands, drawing up the team of mules, while on one side of him sat his middle-aged wife, Martha, the housekeeper, and on the other his young daughter, Phebe, once lady’s maid to Corona Rothsay.

Corona uttered a little cry of joy as she hastened toward the wagon.  The three colored people saw her at once, and, with the unconventionally of their old servitude, shouted out in chorus: 

“How do, Miss C’rona?”

“Sarvint, Miss C’rona!”