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The Flower of the Chapdelaines by George Washington Cable
page 64 of 240 (26%)
Euonymus into the coach and let mother, son, and daughter slumber at
ease.

To the few persons we met I paraded my bonnet and curls. Some, in
Southern fashion, I questioned. I was a widow who had sold her
plantation in order to go and live with a widowed brother. Euonymus
too I showed off, who, waking at every halt, presented a face that
seemed any boy's rather than a runaway's. So natural to these Africans
was the supernatural that I could be one of the men who plucked Lot
from Sodom and yet a becurled widow.

When at noon, at a farmhouse, we had fed horses and dined, I at the
planter's board, my "slaves" under the house-grove trees, Euonymus took
the lines, and for five hours Luke slept inside. Then they changed
places again, and Euonymus and I, face to face, watched the long hot
day wane, and pass through gorgeous changes into twilight. Often I saw
questions in the young eyes that watched me so reverently, but I dared
not encourage them; dared not be a talkative angel. Also my brain had
its questions. How was I to get out of the most perilous trap into
which a sane man--if sane I was--ever thrust himself? There was no
sign that we were being pursued, but it was a harrowing puzzle how,
without drawing suspicion upon the runaways, to get them once more
separated from me and the coach while I should vanish as a lady and
reappear as a gentleman.

"Euonymus, boy, if I should by and by dress as a man could you put
these woman things on, over what you're wearing, and be a lady in my
place?"

"Why, eh, y'--yass'm. Oh, yass'm, ef you say so, my--mistress;
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