"When did you get here, dear?"
"We got here just to-day, Miss Betty," said Hannibal.
Mr. Ware, careless as to dress, with a wiry black beard of a
week's growth decorating his chin and giving an unkempt
appearance which his expression did not mitigate, it being of the
sour and fretful sort; scowled down on the child. He had favored
Boggs' with his presence, not because he felt the least interest
in horse-racing, but because he had no faith in girls, and
especially had he profound mistrust of Betty. She was so much
easily portable wealth, a pink-faced chit ready to fall into the
arms of the first man who proposed to her. But Charley Norton
had not seemed disturbed by the planter's forbidding air.
Between those two there existed complete reciprocity of feeling,
inasmuch as Tom's presence was as distasteful to Norton as his
own presence was distressing to Ware.
"Where is your Uncle Bob, Hannibal?" Betty asked, glancing about,
and at her question a shadow crossed the child's face and the
tears gathered again in his eyes.
"Ain't you seen him, Miss Betty?" he whispered. He had been
sustained by the belief that when he found her he should find his
Uncle Bob, too.
"Why, what do you mean, Hannibal--isn't your Uncle Bob with you?"
demanded Betty.
"He got hurt in a fight, and I got separated from him way back
yonder just after we came out of the mountains." He looked up
piteously into Betty's face. "But you think he'll find me, don't
you?"
"Why, you poor little thing!" cried Betty compassionately, and
again she sank on her knees at Hannibal's side, and slipped her
arms about him.
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