CHAPTER IV

A QUESTION OP VALUATION


Turning in from the lane at the yard gate, Colonel Calvin Blount and
his retinue rode close up to the side door of the plantation house;
but even here the master vouchsafed no salutation to those who
awaited his coming. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, lean and
muscular; yet so far from being thin and dark, he was spare rather
from physical exercise than through gaunt habit of body; his
complexion was ruddy and sun-colored, and the long mustache hanging
across his jaws showed a deep mahogany-red. Western ranchman one
might have called him, rather than southern planter. Scotch-Irish,
generations back, perhaps, yet southern always, and by birth-right
American, he might have been a war-lord of another land and day. No
feudal baron ever dismounted with more assuredness at his own hall,
to toss careless rein to a retainer. He stood now, tall and straight,
a trifle rough-looking in his careless planter's dress, but every
inch the master. A slight frown puckered up his forehead, giving to
his face an added hint of sternness.

Behind this leading figure of the cavalcade came a younger man. In
age perhaps at the mid thirties, tall, slender, with dark hair and
eyes and with a dark mustache shading his upper lip, Henry Decherd,
formerly of New Orleans, for a few years dweller in the Delta,