ed me with a start of last night's business. This very man,
robber of the widow, unnatural brother, and oppressor of the fatherless,
was appointed for death that very morning, and might already be on his
way to meet it. I confess, as I then felt, I could almost have let him
run on his doom; yet when I recalled the vision in the kitchen last
night of Paddy Corkill shouldering the borrowed gun, my humanity
reasserted itself. How could I stand idle with a human life, however
worthless, at stake? As to his being Miss Kit's father, that at the
moment did not enter into my calculations; but as soon as it did, it
urged my footsteps to a still more rapid stride as I made across the
bleak tract for the Black Hill.

The morning was grey and squally, and the mists hung low on the hill-
tops, and swept now and then thickly up the valleys. But I knew the way
well. Tim and I had often as boys walked there to look at the spot
where Terence Gorman fell, and often, in the Knockowen days, I had
driven his honour's gig past the spot on the way to Malin.

The road ascends steeply some little way up the hill between high rocks.
Half-way up it takes a sharp turn inward, skirting the slope on the
level, and so comes out on to the open bog-road beyond. Just at the
angle is a high boulder that almost overhangs the road, affording
complete cover to any one waiting for a traveller, and commanding a view
of him both as he walks his horse up the slope and as he trots forward
on the level. It needed not much guessing to decide that it was here
that Terence Gorman's murderer had lurked that fatal night, and that
here Paddy Corkill would come to find his victim this morning.

As I came to the top of a hill that gave a distant view of the road by
which the traveller would approach, my heart leaped to my mouth. For
there, not a mile and a half away, appeared, in a break of the mist, a
black speck, which I knew well enough to be his honour's gig. In half-
an-hour or less it would reach the fatal spot, and I could barely hope
to reach it before him. The ground in front of me was littered with
boulders, and in places was soft with bog. Rapid progress was
impossible. A false step, a slip might lame me, and so stop me
altogether. Yet on every moment hung the fate of _her_ father!

It was a wild career I made that morning--down hollows, over rocks,
through swamps, and up banks. I soon lost all sight of the road, and
knew I should not see it