een after midday, Mr. Rand?"

"Yes, something after midday."

The witness knew, for he always had his glass at noon. He might have
been dozing when the negro spoke to him, but he spoke plain enough.
"'It's going to be an awful storm,' he said, and then I believe you said
something, sir, though I don't remember what it was, and you both rode
on. I wasn't that sleepy that I couldn't see straight. That's all that I
know, Mr. Galt."

Two or three other witnesses were called, but they were of the main
road, and the main road had nothing to show further than that it had
been travelled upon by Lewis Rand and his negro boy. They had not seen
Mr. Ludwell Cary since he rode to Richmond early in the summer. Yes,
they were sure they had seen Mr. Rand and his negro boy--but the clouds
were dark, and the dust blowing so that you had to hold your head down,
and people were thinking of getting indoors. The boy was riding a mare
with a white foot.

"I think we can leave the main road, gentlemen," declared the coroner.
"Now the river road and the stream where this thing was done--"

Indian Run--where did Indian Run come from or lead to, and who might
have been upon that lonely road, or lurking in the laurel and hemlock
that clothed the banks of the stream? Three miles up the water was a
camping-ground used by gypsies; at a greater distance down the stream a
straggling settlement of poor whites, long looked at askance by the
county. It might be that some wandering gypsy, some Ishmaelite with a
grudge--The enquiry turned again to Fairfax Cary.

"When you went on, Mr. Cary, from Elm Tree, you too supposed that your
brother would follow by the same road? You thought--"

"I did not think at all," answered Cary harshly. "I was lost in my own
self and my own concerns. I was a selfish and heedless wretch, and I
hurried away without a thought or care. What he told me I forgot at the
time. But I have remembered it since. He told me that he would take the
river road."

"And on your own way home you repeated that to no one?"

"To no one. I never spoke of him, I do not know that I ever thought of
him from Elm Tree to Greenwood. Oh, my brother!"

A sigh like the wind over corn went through the room. The coroner bent
forward. "Mr. Cary, can you think of any one who bore him ill-will--a
runaway negro, perhaps, or some vagrant who might have been along that
stream?"

"No. His slaves loved him. We had no runaways. I do not believe there is
a