As that horrible cry echoed through the house of Mr. Sowers, it filled them with terror. We mean it filled all the inmates of the house with terror. All except one—that was Mrs. Sowers. She was hard of hearing. Aunt Sally was the first to be aroused. She waked her husband up (Jack was her husband), and then waked George, or at least she called George, for he was already awake. First she went to Miss Mattie Sowers’ room and called out, “Miss Mattie! Child, what is de matter?” No answer came. She went to the bed. Miss Mattie was covered up and laying [sic] very still. What could it all mean? Then she went to Mrs. Sowers’ room. “Missus Mary,” Sally said as she paused at the door.

“Miss Mary, what’s de matter, honey? Is you dead or been kilt unexspectedly?” But no answer came. Finally she opened the door and walked into the middle of the room. “Miss Mary, Marse Joshua, is you all dead?” Still no answer, so she went to the bed to see if they were all dead. She looked at Mrs. Sowers, and finally she discovered that Mr. Sowers was not there. Where he could have been was a mystery she could not solve, so she concluded she would not wake Mrs. Sowers or Mattie until she had found Mr. Sowers.

“George,” said she to that individual as she left the room. “George, Marse Josh ain’t in bed so let’s hurry up and look for him. Why don’t you go on, you good-for-nothin’ free nigger? Here is Marse Josh gone, and nobody knows whar, and you creepin’ along as if you were jist enterin’ de white folks church at Greenwood. Why don’t you walk fast, I say?” But George’s answer was only one of his quiet smiles. ÷

“Papa,” said Aunt Sally as she reached the kitchen and met Jack. “Say, Dad, I can’t begin to think whar Marse Josh is gone.”

Uncle Jack was too dumbfounded to speak for some time. Finally he said, “What, Marse Josh gone and you two great, big, overgrown niggers standing dere?” And Uncle Jack looked disgusted. Here was an ignorant, uneducated slave ready to die for his master. “Why don’t you go an’ look for Marse Josh?” said Jack indignantly. “Well, stand dere. I’ll find Marse Josh or die tryin’. You an’ George is jist like dum’ niggers in gen’ral.”

Oh nature! How infinitely sublime is nature. It was the nature of this ignorant slave to love a man who had treated him so well. The man who had bought him and his wife just to keep them from being whipped and treated bad by a hard master. Jack set about hunting for his master with a good will. His first proposition was to look the house over. They accordingly looked through the kitchen, dining room, parlor, sitting room, drawing room, and finally they went to the door of his private office and called out, for the door was locked. They called out, “Marse Joshua, whar is you! Is you dead?” But no answer came from the private office.

“Old woman and George, I will have to break dis door down sartin,” said Uncle Jack, his voice quivering with emotion.

“No! No! Jack, dat’ll never do in de world,” said Aunt Sally. “We will look upstairs an’ den in de garret afore we try to break open de private office. You know, Marse always was very strict about dat office of his’n.”

Her words were practicable, so Jack and George acquiesced to her proposition in silence. They went again to Miss Mattie’s room. She was as still as ever. They held the light close to her face and saw it was very pale. They soon left her room and went to the old lady’s room once more. She also was fast asleep. They looked in every room on the second floor. Then they proceeded to the attic. It required some considerable time for them to look over the “garret,” as Aunt Sally called it. Then they came down, and George and Jack went out to the barn. Jack had his whiskey jug hid in the barn. It was near one o’clock, so Jack thought it was no harm to take a little. It would help him to find his master, wouldn’t it? Of course it would, why not? Wasn’t whiskey the very thing for him to take to keep his spirits up? Yes indeed, nothing would do better, nothing would be more essential. So he must take a drink while George was in another part of the barn. They hunted all over the barn from top to bottom, then the corn house, then the granary. They at last went to the mill. As they went along by the ledge, it was too dark for them to see two men sitting silently in the shadows. They went in the mill, called Wilse Reed, went in where Wilse’s bed was. The bed was empty. They went all through the mill. No person was to be found there. They went in to the office at the mill again, looked high and low, but saw no one. They all got wearied out and set down to rest.

“Oh, where can all of de people be at anyhow?” Aunt Sally said as they all seated themselves in the office.

“Well,” George said, “I don’t know where all the people are, but one thing I do know, and that is we had better not try to rest our bones in here. We had better go to the house and set down in the kitchen to rest.” They all took his advice and went to the house. ÷

“Look aheah,” said Aunt Sally as they seated themselves in the kitchen. “Look aheah, darkies, my belief is dat somebody has carried Marse Josh off and kilt him before dis or he would a been heah by dis time.”

“Ah, Aunt Sally,” exclaimed George. “Your ideas are perfectly absurd. If it wasn’t for him being missing, I would be bound to say that you and myself were dreaming the same dream.”

Aunt Sally looked at him indignantly for some time; then she said: ÷ “You nasty little rascal you, how dare you tell me dat? How dar you joke when your Marse Joshua is missin’?”

Uncle Jack began to feel the influence of his whiskey, so he sat very quiet. It was quite one o’clock, and as soon as they had rested they went in the hall to Sowers’ private office.

They were just in the act of breaking open the door when they heard someone open the gate and come up the lawn toward the house. After a while they heard the kitchen door open easily and shut. Then they heard the cautious footsteps of a man walking through the house. The person, whoever it was, walked cautiously to the door of the office. Aunt Sally and Jack and George crept back, and Jack whispered in Sally’s ear:

“I’ll bet anything that’s Marse Josh!”

***

We must turn our attention to Mrs. Barton for a short while. When Wilse Reed left, she fell into a train of the most serious reflections. It was half past eight o’clock when Wilse Reed left. Kate came in about nine. A young man escorted her home. She soon went to bed. Their house was only a story and a half high. Kate slept upstairs and her mother slept downstairs.

“Oh what a fool I was in my young days,” said Mrs. Barton. “What a fool I have been; a great many think Kate is—” She did not finish the sentence but rose up and prepared for bed. But she could not go to sleep. She lay there for a long time wide awake. It was very warm for so early in April. She got up and hoisted the window and seated herself near it. While she is sitting there, we will describe her in as few words as possible. She was about fifty years of age. Her hair, which had been a beautiful golden color, was very much sprinkled with gray. She had had a great deal of trouble in her young days and that accounted for her hair being so gray. As she sat there, her thoughts went back to the time when she was a young girl, when she first received the attentions of a young widower. She was young and pretty then. She was so thoughtless, so very innocent. She remembered the twilight evening, the evening when she stood on the porch of her dear mother’s residence in the outskirts of a small town in New England. Yes, she remembered it only too well, the evening she had stood on the porch, a young widower pleading with her for an answer to his great question: “I love you. Will you be my wife?”

Yes, those were the widower’s words. She blushed a while, and then said, “Yes.” She looked back to the time when he led her to the altar, when she had vowed to love, honor, and obey until death severed the tie. Had she kept her word? No, she had not kept her word. What was it that ever induced her to break her word? Oh horror! What was it indeed? Had death—? No, death had not severed the tie but something else. Oh horror, something else. She turned her thoughts in a different channel to the time when she had stood at the death-bed^[1] of her father and then at the death-bed of her mother. She had lost both of them before she had been married a year. Troubles had come thick and fast. As the old proverb says, “misfortunes seldom come alone.” It had been misfortune after misfortune as soon as she was married. Misfortunes were her lot, and finally she had found out that her marriage was a misfortune. Oh! What harrowing thoughts! How she shuddered as she thought of them times, of the time when she was young, when she got married, and then of the time when she lost her husband not in death but by being suspected of                 . Oh, it was too dreadful to think of!

“Oh, I am miserable,” she murmured. “I am miserable. Oh Matthew Barton, when you married me you blighted my happy life. You have made my life miserable.”

Who was Matthew Barton? And where was he? Reader? Who was he and where was he? We shall find out. Next is what had he done? How had he blighted her life? Had he murdered anyone? Or had he turned highwayman? We shall find all out in the end. It is for us to do. We must. There is no alternative. We must unravel the secret of this woman’s life. It is nothing more than duty, nothing more. So we will—I will take an author’s privilege of looking into her former life. I will take the privilege of unraveling this woman’s secret life. She had come to Brookland some three years before the opening of our story. No one knew who she was nor where she came from any more than that she came from a New England town. Some said she had never been married, others said she was no respectable woman. She bore it all without a word. All Mr. Sowers knew about her was that she paid the rent regular, and he always said she was a noble woman. She was a nice housekeeper also, and she had taught Kate all she knew about housekeeping.

She had had a lover before Matthew Barton. She had promised to marry him, [but] he went of[f] to the far, far west, and she believed him dead as she had never heard of him again. Would she ever see him again? That question gained place in her mind, but it was soon expelled by one not half so pleasant. Was her husband dead? No, no, but worse than dead! It was now near twelve o’clock. She tried to arouse herself but she could not. Those awful reflections was [sic] a terrible strain on her nerves.

She saw a man dressed in miller’s clothing pass along near the house. It was an unusual hour for a miller to be out, but she thought perhaps it might [be] one of the millers from Greenwood mills. She didn’t pay much attention to the person in question, for her thoughts were elsewhere. The night air was getting very cool, but she still sat there looking out of the window.

She was beautiful in her old age. She had been more beautiful in her young days.

“I can have no peace until I speak my past history over to I, myself. Eighteen years ago I married Matthew Barton the widower of Springfield. I lived with him happily for a considerable time. I also took care of a child, a boy he said was his first wife’s child. Finally he was—”

Here was an instance where the old proverb comes true. The old proverb says, “Man proposes and God disposes.” Mrs. Barton had made the proposition to tell her own private history. Just as she was going to divulge what her husband had done to sever the ties between them, a horrible shriek was heard in the direction of Mr. Sowers’ residence. Mrs. Barton gave a start and reiterated in a scared voice:

“Merciful heaven, who can it be? Who can it be?”