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“Glad to see yeh again, Mis’ Braown,” he said when he reached the top of the bank. “Where’s Mr. Braown?”

“He’s gone down to the Nancy Jane. Won’t you come in, Captain Perkins? Come in and sit down a while.”

“Wal, yes. And how’s your little gal?” Seeing a dubious look on Mrs. Browne’s face, he said: “Or is it a boy, now? I call at so many houses I git confused. Fine child, I remember.”

“The lad’s gone off with his father,” said Judith, giving Perkins a seat in the passage.

After more preliminary talk the peddler got to his main point, that he had lots of nice notions and things this year cheaper’n they could be had in London. All the folks agreed that his things were “cheaper, considerin’ quality, Mis’ Braown, than you could git ’em in London.”

Judith knew by experience that his things were neither very good nor very cheap, but her only chance in life to know anything of the delights of shopping lay in the coming of peddling sloops. One might order a frock, a bonnet, or a petticoat from London, but one must wait nearly a year till the tobacco ship returned to get what had been sent for. It was better to be cheated a little in order to get the pleasure of making up her mind and then changing it, of fancying herself possessor now of this and now of that, and finally getting what she liked best after having had the usufruct of the whole stock. She was soon examining the goods that Perkins’s boy had brought up to her–fancy things for herself and young Sanford, and coarse cloth for her servants. She concluded nothing about staple trading till her husband should return; for prices were to be fixed on the corn and bacon which must be paid in exchange. But there were articles that she craved, and of which she preferred not to speak to her husband, for a while at least, and these she paid for from her little hoard of pieces of eight, or Spanish dollars. The change she made in fractions of these coins–actual quarters of dollars cut like pieces of pie. These were tested in Perkins’s little money scales. Less than a quarter of a dollar was usually disregarded in the South; and as for Perkins, he never seemed to have any fractional silver to give back in change, but always proposed some little article that he would put in at cost just to fill up to the value of a piece of eight.

* * * * *

Paddling with the wind, Sanford Browne’s cedar canoe made good speed, and as the sun was setting and the wind falling it glided past the Yankee sloop into shoal water farther up, where its inmates disembarked, and beached their craft.

Sanford Browne walked rapidly up the bank, followed by his son, the servants, and the old convict. He approached Perkins and greeted him, but in a manner not cordial and hardly courteous. He looked at Judith so severely that she fancied him offended with her. She reflected quickly that he could not have known anything of her surreptitious trading with the peddler. Uriah Perkins concluded that a storm was brewing between husband and wife, and found it necessary to return to the sloop to make her fast astern, against the turn of the tide and the veering of the wind.

When Perkins had disappeared, Sanford Browne pointed to the convict and said slowly and with fierceness:

“Judy, that’s the man. That’s Black Jim Lewis, that stole me away from home and sold me for a redemptioner. Jocko, go fetch the manacles.”

Judith stood speechless. It was a guiding maxim with her that women should not meddle with men’s business, and it was an article of faith that whatever her husband did was right. She sympathized with his resentment against the man who had kidnaped him. But the sight of the terror-stricken face of the cowardly brute smote her woman’s heart with pity as the manacles were put on the convict’s wrists.