“Bah!” said Tom Loker, who had listened to these stories with ill-repressed disgust,—­“shif’less, both on ye! my gals don’t cut up no such shines, I tell ye!”

“Indeed! how do you help it?” said Marks, briskly.

“Help it? why, I buys a gal, and if she’s got a young un to be sold, I jest walks up and puts my fist to her face, and says, ’Look here, now, if you give me one word out of your head, I’ll smash yer face in.  I won’t hear one word—­not the beginning of a word.’  I says to ’em, ’This yer young un’s mine, and not yourn, and you’ve no kind o’ business with it.  I’m going to sell it, first chance; mind, you don’t cut up none o’ yer shines about it, or I’ll make ye wish ye’d never been born.’  I tell ye, they sees it an’t no play, when I gets hold.  I makes ’em as whist as fishes; and if one on ’em begins and gives a yelp, why,—­” and Mr. Loker brought down his fist with a thump that fully explained the hiatus.

“That ar’s what ye may call emphasis,” said Marks, poking Haley in the side, and going into another small giggle.  “An’t Tom peculiar? he! he!  I say, Tom, I s’pect you make ’em understand, for all niggers’ heads is woolly.  They don’t never have no doubt o’ your meaning, Tom.  If you an’t the devil, Tom, you ’s his twin brother, I’ll say that for ye!”

Tom received the compliment with becoming modesty, and began to look as affable as was consistent, as John Bunyan says, “with his doggish nature.”

Haley, who had been imbibing very freely of the staple of the evening, began to feel a sensible elevation and enlargement of his moral faculties,—­a phenomenon not unusual with gentlemen of a serious and reflective turn, under similar circumstances.

“Wal, now, Tom,” he said, “ye re’lly is too bad, as I al’ays have told ye; ye know, Tom, you and I used to talk over these yer matters down in Natchez, and I used to prove to ye that we made full as much, and was as well off for this yer world, by treatin’ on ’em well, besides keepin’ a better chance for comin’ in the kingdom at last, when wust comes to wust, and thar an’t nothing else left to get, ye know.”

“Boh!” said Tom, “don’t I know?—­don’t make me too sick with any yer stuff,—­my stomach is a leetle riled now;” and Tom drank half a glass of raw brandy.

“I say,” said Haley, and leaning back in his chair and gesturing impressively, “I’ll say this now, I al’ays meant to drive my trade so as to make money on ’t fust and foremost, as much as any man; but, then, trade an’t everything, and money an’t everything, ’cause we ’s all got souls.  I don’t care, now, who hears me say it,—­and I think a cussed sight on it,—­so I may as well come out with it.  I b’lieve in religion, and one of these days, when I’ve got matters tight and snug, I calculates to tend to my soul and them ar matters; and so what’s the use of doin’ any more wickedness than ’s re’lly necessary?—­it don’t seem to me it’s ’t all prudent.”