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 believed you. Your true father was an Indian of the Catawba nation, who passed through the Cypress the year before on his way to the city."

"Go on&mdash;the particulars."

"Ask not that&mdash;not that, boy; I pray ye&mdash;"

"All&mdash;all."

"I will not&mdash;I cannot&mdash;it was my wickedness&mdash;my shocking wickedness! I will not speak it aloud for worlds."

"Speak it you must, but you may whisper it in my ears. Stoop&mdash;"

She did so, passively as it were, and in a low tone, broken only by her own pauses and his occasional exclamations, she poured into his ear a dark, foul narrative of criminal intercourse, provoked on her part by a diseased appetite, resulting, as it would seem, in punishment, in the birth of a monster like himself. Yet he listened to it, if not passively, at least without any show of emotion or indignation; and as she finished, and hurrying away from him threw herself into her old seat, and covered her skinny face with her hands, he simply thrust his fingers into the long straight black hair depending over his eyes, which seemed to carry confirmatory evidence enough for the support of the story to which he had listened. He made no other movement, but appeared, for a while, busy in reflection. She every now and then looked towards him doubtfully, and with an aspect which had in it something of apprehension. At length, rising, though with an air of effort, from the couch, he took a paper from his pocket which he studied a little while by the blaze in the chimney, then approaching her, he spoke in language utterly unaffected by what he had heard&mdash;

"Hark ye, mother; I shall now go back to the camp. It's something of a risk, but nothing risk, nothing gain; and if I run a risk, it's for something. I go back to blind Singleton, for I shall tell him all the truth about my coming here. He won't do any thing more than scold a little, for the thing's common; but if he should&mdash;"

"What, my son?&mdash;speak!"

"No," he muttered to himself, "no danger of that&mdash;he dare not. But you come, mother,&mdash;come to the camp by sunrise, and see