"The idee jes' streck me ter-day whenst I viewed him along about that
road. Whenst that thar dead man tuk yer han' an' tried ter find a word
of speech-- Why, hullo, Narcissa!"

With a short cry she had struggled to her feet. The gathering gloom,
the recollection of the tragedy, the association of ideas, bore too
heavily on her nerves. She struck petulantly at his astounded face.

"Why air ye always remindin' me?" she exclaimed, with a sharp
upbraiding note. And then she began to cry out that she could see
again the coroner's jury pressing close about the corpse, with a keen
ravenous interest like the vile mountain vultures, and then
colloguing together aside, and nodding their heads and saying they had
found their verdict, when they had found nothing, not even the poor
dead man; and she saw them here, and she saw them there, and
everywhere in the darkling mountain woods, and she would see them
everywhere as long as she should live, and she wished with all her
heart that they were every one at the bottom of the black mountain
river.

And the slow Ben wondered, as he sought to soothe her and take her
home, that a woman should be so sensitive to the mention of one dead
man, and yet given to such wishes of the wholesale destruction of the
harmless coroner's jury, because their appearance struck her amiss,
and they collogued together, and nodded their heads unacceptably, and
found their verdict.

V.

Except in so far as his sedulously cultivated fraternal sentiments
were concerned, the peculiar domestic training to which Ben Hanway had
been subjected had had slight effect in softening a somewhat hard and
stern character. To continue the canine simile by which his mother had
described him, his gentleness and watchful care toward his sister were
not more reassuring to the public at large than is the tender loyalty
of a guard-dog toward the infant of a house which claims his fealty;
that the dog does not bite the baby is no fair augury that he will not
bite the peddler or the prowler. The fact that the traveler had borne
letters addressed to Alan Selwyn, and no other papers, and yet Alan
Selwyn could not or would not identify him, had already furnished
Hanway with an ever-recurrent subject of cogitation. It had been the
presumption of the coroner's jury, since confirmed by inquiry of the
postmaster, that, going for some purpose to Alan Selwyn's lodge in the
wilderness, the unknown traveler had, in passing, called for