There was no doubt, now, that the stranger was interested, and had his companion been a close observer he would have seen the kindling light in his eyes, and the spots of red beginning to show on his face.  Whether to talk or not was a question in his mind.  Cowardice prompted him to remain silent, and something which defied silence prompted him at last to talk.

“I was with Mr. Thomas Hardy in college,” he said, “and I have visited him in his home.  He is my best friend.”

“To-be-sure!” the Georgian said, hitching nearer to the stranger, as if there was a bond of relationship between them.

The man had given no inkling of the date of his visit, and as it was some years since Tom was graduated the Georgian did not dream of associating the visit with a few weeks before, when he had heard that a high buck was at old man Hardy’s and with Tom was painting the neighborhood red and scandalizing some of the more sober citizens with his excesses.  This quiet stranger with the proud face and hard eyes never helped paint anything.  It was somebody else, whose name he had forgotten, but of whom he went on to speak in not very complimentary terms.

“A high buck, I never happened to see squar in the face,” he said.  “Had glimpses of him in the distance ridin’ ole man Hardy’s sorrel, like he was crazy, and oncet reelin’ in the saddle.  Yes, sar, reelin’, as if he’d took too much.  I b’lieve in a drink when you are dry, but Lord land, whar’s the sense of reelin’?  I don’t see it, do you?”

The stranger said he didn’t and the Georgian went on, now in a lower, confidential voice.

“I actually hearn that this chap,—­what the deuce was his name?  Have you an idee?  He was from the North?”

If the stranger had an idee he didn’t give it, and the Georgian continued:  “These two young chaps—­Tom ain’t right young though, same age as you, I reckon—­called on some Cracker girls back in the woods and the Northern feller staid thar two or three days.  Think of it—­Cracker girls!  Now, if’ted been niggers, instead of Crackers!”

“Ugh!” the stranger exclaimed, wakened into something like life.  “Don’t talk any more about that man!  He must have been a sneak and villain and a low-lived dog, and if there is any meaner name you can give him, do so.  It will fit him well, and please me.”

“Call him a Cracker, but a Florida one.  Georgy is mostly better—­not up to so much snuff, you know,” the Georgian suggested, while the Northerner drew a quick breath and thought of Mandy Ann, and wondered where she was and if he should see her again.

He felt as if there was not a dry thread in one of his garments when his companion left him, and returning to his friends reported that he hadn’t made much out of the chap.  He wasn’t from New York, nor Boston, nor Chicago, and “I don’t know where in thunder he is from, nor his name nuther.  I forgot to ask it, he was so stiff and offish.  He was in college with Tom Hardy and visited him years ago; that’s all I know,” the planter said, and after that the stranger was left mostly to himself, while the passengers busied themselves with gossip, and the scenery, and trying to keep cool.