and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better and actuly _safer_ than a lie.  I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it.  Well, I says to myself at last, I'm a-going to chance it; I'll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you'll go to. Then I says: “Miss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a little ways where you could go and stay three or four days?” “Yes; Mr. Lothrop's.  Why?” “Never mind why yet.  If I'll tell you how I know the niggers will see each other again inside of two weeks--here in this house--and _prove_ how I know it--will you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?” “Four days!” she says; “I'll stay a year!” “All right,” I says, “I don't want nothing more out of _you_ than just your word--I druther have it than another man's kiss-the-Bible.”  She smiled and reddened up very sweet, and I says, “If you don't mind it, I'll shut the door--and bolt it.” Then I come back and set down again, and says: “Don't you holler.  Just set still and take it like a man.  I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it.  These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds--regular dead-beats.  There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy.” It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says: