onsible for him," urged Miss Allison. "Since it happened
on our place, and my little nephews brought him here, it seems to me
that we ought to have the care of him."

The professor waved her aside, lifting Jonesy's head as tenderly as a
nurse could have done, and motioned the coloured men to lift him up.

"No, no, fraulein," he said. "I have had eggsperience. It is besser the
poor leedle knabe go mit me!"

There was no opposing the old man's masterful way. Miss Allison stepped
aside for them to pass, calling after him her willingness to do the
nursing he had taken upon himself, and insisting that she would come
early in the morning to help.

Unc' Henry was left to guard the ruins, lest some stray spark should be
blown toward the other buildings. "Dis yere ole niggah wa'n't mistaken
aftah all," he muttered. "Dee was somebody prowlin' 'roun' de premises
yistiddy evenin'." Then he searched the ground, all around the cabin,
for footprints in the snow. He found some tracks presently, and followed
them over the meadow in the starlight, across the road, and down the
railroad track several rods. There they suddenly disappeared. The tramp
had evidently walked on the rail some distance. If Unc' Henry had gone
quarter of a mile farther up the track, he would have found those same
sliding imprints on every other crosstie, as if the man had taken long
running leaps in his haste to get away.

Jonesy stoutly denied that the man had set fire to the cabin. "We nearly
froze to death that night," he said, when questioned about it afterward,
"and the boss piled on an awful big lot of wood just before he went
to bed."

"Then what made him take to his heels so fast if he didn't?" some one
asked.

"I don't know," answered Jonesy. "He said that luck was always against
him, and maybe he thought nobody would believe him if he did say that he
didn't do it."

Several days after that Malcolm found the tramp's picture in the
_Courier-Journal_. He was a noted criminal who had escaped from a
Northern penitentiary some two months before, and had been arrested by
the Louisville police. There was no mistaking him. That big, ugly scar
branded him on cheek and forehead like another Cain.

"And to think that that terrible man was harboured on my place!"
exclaimed Mrs. MacIntyre when she heard of it. "And you boys were down
there in the cabin with him for hours! Sat beside him and talked with
him! What will your mother say? I feel as if you had be