Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/388

 Yankee of the lot. He coolly produced the advertisement, closing with these words, "To be sold without reserve," and insisted that the sale should go on. In this, the company and the auctioneer sustained him; and, as no other bids were made, presently the auctioneer's hammer fell. "Sold," he said, "for one hundred dollars, to Mr?"

"Cash," answered Colter, handing out one of the very hundred dollar bills which he had won, a few weeks before, from the Boston cotton broker. "Make out a receipted bill of this Boston man's claim to this woman, as sold to Mr Archer Moore, of London."

The bill was speedily made out, and, in spite of a certain degree of dissatisfaction visible meanwhile even through the solemn stolidity of the foiled Bostonian, Colter motioning to Cassy to come with us, to which she responded with all alacrity, and we three left the sales room together; but not before the laughing and good-natured auctioneer had another woman on the auction block, a lady's maid of sixteen, raised in a good Maryland family, warranted intact, and title unquestionable, upon whom he solicited a generous bid.

I shall not undertake to describe the scene between myself and Cassy, when she came to recognize in me, as she speedily did, her long lost husband. Her joy at the meeting was no less exalted than mine; but her surprise was greatly diminished by a confident expectation which, it seemed, she had all along entertained, and which had formed with her a settled article of belief, — the hope of sanguine souls easily transforming itself into faith, — that sooner or later she should certainly again find me. And so, like a true wife and lover, she had kept, in all this long absence, the best place in her heart empty, swept, and garnished, and waiting to receive me; and now she clasped me to it, rather as him whose return from a long wandering she had day by day and night by night patiently expected and waited for, than as one irretrievably lost, and unexpectedly, however welcomely, found.