“No thanks, stranger; I’d help you more, if I could; but my hands are kinder tied like, and if they were free, sarcumstances would prevent me from givin’ you any aid.”

Having thus compromised the matter with his conscience, Dick walked away, resolved to have nothing to do with the affair.  Indeed, his sickness of the “wimen bizness” was hourly increasing, and he was half tempted to leave Bill, unless he would relinquish Eveline.

While these events were transpiring, Eveline, wide awake and excited by fear, continued to listen to every sound without, remaining perfectly still herself, so that the inmates of the house supposed she was sleeping.

We will here remark, that the house was a double-cabin, with a kitchen attached to one of the ends, and a sleeping-room to the other.  The family were in the kitchen, and Eveline was in the room opposite to it on the same side, but at the other end of the house.  The part of the cabin leading to and from the kitchen, was in one large room; but the part leading to and from Eveline’s room, was divided into three apartments, two small sleeping-rooms, and one large hall-shaped one, extending the full length of the house, which was a kind of sitting-room, and into it opened all three of the bed-rooms, two at the side and one at the end.  There was a rude chamber above these rooms, furnished with beds; for old Sampson’s was a rendezvous for thieves and pickpockets, who often assembled there in considerable numbers, rendering it necessary for him to have these various accommodations for their benefit.  Old Sampson himself was an outlaw, and many a murder had been committed in his house, and always in the room occupied by Hadley, with which there was a secret communication, and beneath it a vault for the reception of the dead bodies of his victims, until such time as they could be removed without detection.

With this brief explanation, we return to the thread of the narrative.

When Eveline heard the voice of the stranger, she was struck with its peculiarity, but, as it was louder than she had been used to hear Hadley speak, she did not recognize it, and the few brief words she afterward heard him utter, were too indistinctly heard by her to elicit the truth.  When, however, she heard that well-known voice thanking the men for their kindness, she recognized it in a moment, and but for the fact that he was just retiring, she would have rushed out and thrown herself in his arms.

Hadley had not long been gone, when she heard a low murmuring of voices back of her room, and noiselessly approaching the side of her apartment nearest the speakers, she placed her ear to a crevice in the logs, and listened.

“I don’t want to go to extremes unless there is good reason to believe he has considerable money about him.”

These words, spoken by the host, were the first she heard distinctly.

“I think there is no doubt on that point,” was the reply, “for to my certain knowledge he has just inherited an estate from a rich uncle.”