“Paddle your own ‘dug out,’ Bedney, and show your s’creshun.  If Marse Alfred wants to set the red-eyed hounds of the Law on an innocent ’oman, let him blow his horn.”

She knitted assiduously, and looked composedly at her husband, whose lower jaw had suddenly fallen, while his eyelids blinked nervously, as though attacked by St. Vitus’ dance.

“Only five minutes, Bedney.”

Mr. Churchill took out his watch, and held it open.

“You see, Marse Alfred, I—­”

“I don’t see anything but an infernal fraud you two have planned.  Only three minutes more.  There is a constable waiting at the gate, and if he can not persuade you to—­”

“Bedney, step and fetch him in, and let Marse Alfred see the sarching job done up all right.”

“No, I don’t hunt foxes that way.  Instead of searching this cabin, we will just march you both instanter out of these comfortable quarters, and let you try how soft the beds are, at the ’State boarding-house.’  You will sleep cold on iron bunks, and miss your feathers and your crazy quilts.  Time’s up.”

He closed his watch, with a snap, and rose as he returned it to his pocket.

“Hold on, Marse Alfred!  My head ain’t hard enough to run it plum into a wolf’s jaws.  I ain’t ’sponsible for nobody’s acts but my own, and if Dyce have committed a pius fraud, in this here hank’cher bizness, to screen Miss Ellie’s child, why, you see yourself, I had no hand in it.  I did find that blue ‘rag,’ as you seen fit to call it, but it was nigh on to twenty years ago. when I pulled it out of the breast pocket of a dead Yankee officer, we found lying across a cannon, what my old Marster’s regiment captured at the battle of Manassas.  I gin it to my wife as a screw-veneer o’ the war and she have treasured it accordin’.  You are a married man yourself, Marse Alfred, and you are obleedged to know that wedlock is such a tight partnership, that it is an awfully resky thing for a man to so much as bat his eyes, or squint ’em, toward the west, when the wife of his bosom has set her’n to the east.  I have always ’lowed Dyce her head, ’pecially in jokes like that one she was playing on you just now, ’cause St. John the Baptist said a man must forsake father and mother and cleave unto his wife; but conjugular harness is one thing, and the law is another, and I don’t hanker after forsaking my pine-knot fire, and feather bed, to cleave unto jail bars, and handcuffs.  I see you are tired of Dyce’s jokes, and you mean bizzness; and I don’t intend to consume no more of your valuable solicitous time.  Dyce, fetch me that plank bottom cher to stand on.”

“Fetch it yourself.  Paddling your own canoe, means headin’ for the mill dam.”

Bedney hastened to procure the designated chair, which he mounted in front of the mantel piece, and thence reaching up to the portrait of President Lincoln, took it carefully down from the hook.  With the blade of his pocket-knife, he loosened some tacks which secured the thin pine slats at the back of the picture, and removed them.  He took everything from the frame, and blank dismay seized him, when the desired object was nowhere visible.