For true as you live, that hound of a captain, when he found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated all his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch.

If I hadn't met a man down there that offered to marry me and brought me here, I might have died there, I reckon.

But I did, and here I am.

I went down there as your husband's sweetheart, I've come back as the wife of an honest man, and I reckon it's about square!" There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied, so contagiously good-humored in the woman's perfect moral unconsciousness, that even if Mrs.Tucker had been less preoccupied her resentment would have abated.

But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchres of his memory and disinter his deeply buried thoughts.
"You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs.Capting Baxter--ez used to be French Inez of New Orleans--hez told ye.