answered Tom with quiet emphasis. Tim walked away laughing.
Tom stepped out of the house, and with his wooden leg marked a dead line around the house about ten feet from each corner. To the crowd that stood near he said in a clear ringing voice as he stood up in the doorway.
"I'll kill the first nigger that crosses that line."
There was no attempt to cross it. They did not like the look of Tom's face as he sat there pale and silent. And they could hear the sobs of his wife inside.
The sale was a brief formality. There was but one bidder, the Honourable Tim Shelby. It was knocked down to Tim for the sum of eighty-five dollars, the exact amount of the tax levy which Legree and his brigands had fixed.
Tim was not buying on his own account. He was the purchasing agent of the subsidiary ring which Legree had organised to hold the real estate forfeited for taxes until a rise in value would bring them millions of profit. They had stolen from the state Treasury the money to capitalise this company. Where it was possible to exact a cash ransom, they always took it and cancelled the tax order, preferring the certainty of good gold in their pockets to the uncertainties of politics.
They tried their best to get a cash ransom of ten thousand dollars for the town of Hambright. But the ruined people could not raise a thousand. So Tim Shelby as the agent of the "Union Land and Improvement Company," became the owner of farm after farm and home after home.
It was a vain hope that relief could come from any quarter. The red flag of the Sheriff's auctioneer fluttered from two thousand three hundred and twenty doors in the county. This was over two-thirds of the total.
