The old man, who was gouty and full of weary chills of body and mind, used to sit in the sun and dream, to his faint solace, until Arthur was a grown man and through college, and Anna a young girl at school near by.  The little that had been left, with the bare exception of the home estate, the plantation, and the mine, had been sold to pay for Arthur’s education.  Arthur had been out of college only one summer when his father died.  His mother, whose proud spirit had fretted the flesh from her bones and drunk up her very blood with futile rage and repining, had died during the war.  Then Arthur, who had control of everything, as his sister’s guardian, set to work to carry out his father’s cherished dream with regard to the coal-mine.  He sold every foot of the estate to a neighboring planter, an old friend of his father’s, at a sacrifice, with a condition attached that he should have the option of buying it back for cash, at an advanced price, at the end of five years.  The purchaser, who was a shrewd sort, of Scotch descent, curiously grafted on to an impetuous, hot-blooded Southern growth, looked at the slim young fellow with his expression of ingenuous almost fatuous confidence in his leading-strings of fate, and considered that he was safe enough and had made a good bargain.  He too had suffered from the war, in more ways than one.  He had come out of the strife shorn in his fleece of worldly wealth and mutilated as to his body.  He limped stiffly on a wooden leg, and his fine buildings had gone up in fire and smoke.  But during the years since the war he had retrieved his fortunes.  People said he was worth more than before; everything he had handled had prospered.  He was one of those men whose very touch seems to multiply possessions.  He was a much younger man than Arthur’s father, and robust at the time of his death.  He explained to Arthur that he was doing him an incalculable service in purchasing his patrimonial estate, when he announced his decision so to do, after taking several weeks to conceal his alacrity.

“It is not everybodee would take a propertee, with such a condeetion attached, Arthur, boy,” he said.  He had at times a touch of the Scotch in his accent.  His father had been straight from the old country when he married the planter’s daughter.  “Not everybodee, with such a condeetion,” he repeated, and the boy innocently believed him.  He had been used, ever since he was a child and could remember anything, to seeing a good deal of the man.  The Southern wife had died early and the man had been lonely and given to frequent friendly meetings with Mr. Carroll, who had valued him.

“He’s the right sort, Arthur,” he had often told the boy; “you can depend on him.  He has given his gold and his flesh and blood for the South, although he came on one side of another race and might have sided against us.  He’s the right sort.”