y as wrote it, nor him she wrote
to. I only mean that neither letter nor picture are needed to prove
what we're all wantin' to know, an' do know. They arn't nor warn't
reequired. To my mind, from the fust go off, nothin' ked be clarer than
that Charley Clancy has been killed, cepting as to who killed him--
murdered him, if ye will; for that's what's been done. Is there a man
on the ground who can't call out the murderer?"

The interrogatory is answered by a unanimous negative, followed by the
name, "Dick Darke."

And along with the answer commences a movement throughout the crowd. A
scattering with threats heard--some muttered, some spoken aloud--while
men are observed looking to their guns, and striding towards their
horses; as they do so, saying sternly,--

"To the jail!"

In ten minutes after both men and horses are in motion moving along the
road between Clancy's cottage and the county town. They form a phalanx,
if not regular in line of march, terribly imposing in aspect.

Could Richard Darke, from inside the cell where he is confined, but see
that approaching cavalcade, hear the conversation of those who compose
it, and witness their angry gesticulations, he would shake in his shoes,
with trembling worse than any ague that ever followed fever.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

A SCHEME OF COLONISATION.

About two hundred miles from the mouth of Red River--the Red of
Louisiana--stands the town of Natchitoches. The name is Indian, and
pronounced as if written "Nak-e-tosh." Though never a populous place,
it is one of peculiar interest, historically and ethnologically. Dating
from the earliest days of French and Spanish colonisation, on the Lower
Mississippi, it has at different periods been in possession of both
these nations; finally falling to the United States, at the transfer of
the Louisiana territory by Napoleon Bonaparte. Hence, around its
history is woven much of romantic interest; while from the same cause
its population, composed of many various nationalities, with their
distinctive physical types and idiosyncracies of custom, offers to the
eye of the stranger a picturesqueness unknown to northern towns. Placed
on a projecting bluff of the river's bank, its painted wooden houses, of
French Creole fashion, with "piazzas" and high-pitched roofs, its
trottoirs brick-paved, and shaded by trees of sub-tropical foliage--
among them the odoriferous magnolia, and _melia azedarach_, or "Pride of
China,