his hard-finished heart loved nothing but himself, his name, and his
motherless children. But these!--their ravishing beauty was all but
excuse enough for the unbounded idolatry of their father. Against these
seven goddesses he never rebelled. Had they even required him to defraud
old De Carlos--

I can hardly say.

Old De Carlos was his extremely distant relative on the Choctaw side.
With this single exception, the narrow thread-like line of descent from
the Indian wife, diminished to a mere strand by injudicious alliances,
and deaths in the gutters of old New Orleans, was extinct. The name, by
Spanish contact, had become De Carlos; but this one surviving bearer of
it was known to all, and known only, as Injin Charlie.

One thing I never knew a Creole to do. He will not utterly go back on
the ties of blood, no matter what sort of knots those ties may be. For
one reason, he is never ashamed of his or his father's sins; and for
another,--he will tell you--he is "all heart!"

So the different heirs of the De Charleu estate had always strictly
regarded the rights and interests of the De Carloses, especially their
ownership of a block of dilapidated buildings in a part of the city,
which had once been very poor property, but was beginning to be
valuable. This block had much more than maintained the last De Carlos
through a long and lazy lifetime, and, as his household consisted only
of himself, and an aged and crippled negress, the inference was
irresistible that he "had money." Old Charlie, though by _alias_ an
"Injin," was plainly a dark white man, about as old as Colonel De
Charleu, sunk in the bliss of deep ignorance, shrewd, deaf, and, by