"I really don't know," she presently confessed. "I think it was one thousand dollars; but I was so hurried in leaving that I didn't look carefully," and the wild thought surged in her, suppose it was more!
She ran into the other room and plunged into her trunk; beneath the clothes, beneath the beauty of the Silver Fleece, till her fingers clutched and tore the envelope. A little choking cry burst from her throat, her knees trembled so that she was obliged to sit down.
In her fingers fluttered a check for--ten thousand dollars!
It was not until the next day that the two women were sufficiently composed to talk matters over sanely.
"What is your plan?" asked Zora.
"To put the money in a Northern savings bank at three per cent interest; to supply the rest of the interest, and the deficit in the running expenses, from our balance, and to send you North to beg."
Zora shook her head. "It won't do," she objected. "I'd make a poor beggar; I don't know human nature well enough, and I can't talk to rich white folks the way they expect us to talk."
"It wouldn't be hypocrisy, Zora; you would be serving in a great cause. If you don't go, I--"
"Wait! You sha'n't go. If any one goes it must be me. But let's think it out: we pay off the mortgage, we get enough to run the school as it has been run. Then what? There will still be slavery and oppression all around us. The children will be kept in the cotton fields; the men will be cheated, and the women--" Zora paused and her eyes grew hard.
She began again rapidly: "We must have land--our own farm with our own tenants--to be the beginning of a free community."
Miss Smith threw up her hands impatiently.
"But sakes alive! Where, Zora? Where can we get land, with Cresswell owning every inch and bound to destroy us?"
Zora sat hugging her knees and staring out the window toward the sombre ramparts of the swamp. In her eyes lay slumbering the madness of long ago; in her brain danced all the dreams and visions of childhood.
"I'm thinking," she murmured, "of buying the swamp."