Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/409

 received a little crumpled note from Eliza, written, apparently in great haste, with a pencil on a blank leaf torn from some book, stating that she was held as prisoner in Mr Gilmore's house, as his slave, bought, as he pretended, of Mr Agrippa Curtis, who had just arrived from Boston, claiming the entire inheritance of his brother's property, and herself as a part of it! Cassy was horror-struck at this terrible news; but while she was considering whom to apply to and what could be done, Mr Agrippa Curtis, accompanied by his Boston lawyer, by Mr Gilmore, and two or three black servants, entered her house, claiming to take possession of that and her, as his property; and it was as a sequel to this seizure that she had been exposed for sale in the auction room where I had so providentially found her, and but for which, spite of her protestations to claims of freedom, — which she had no means to substantiate, since the very person in whose hands her free papers were, had proved traitor and kidnapper, — she would doubtless have been sold into some new bondage.

Such was the story of which, at our first interview, Cassy gave me a brief and hasty outline, the particulars of which I afterwards learnt more at length.

Thank God, I pressed her to my heart once more, my own; my own true wife!

But my boy, my son, and her whom Cassy claimed and wept for as her dear, dear daughter, — what should be done for Eliza and Montgomery, the one already betrayed and entrapped, the other in great danger to be so?:

Again I called Colter into our council, and again I found him prompt to sympathize, and ready to act; quite delighted indeed, as he said, to help in counterworking these two Yankee scoundrels, who had no doubt conspired together to destroy Mr Curtis's will, and to divide the estate between them; seeking to reduce Cassy and Eliza, and probably Montgomery too, to slavery; not so much for the sake of what they would sell for, — he didn't suppose that even