art? What hand had
ye in the removal of this small barrier to the fortune my own poor
health warranted you in looking upon even in those early days as your
own? To others' eyes it may appear none; to mine, ye are one and all
his murderers as certainly as all of you were the murderers of the good
physician hastening to his aid. For his illness was not a mortal one. He
would have been saved if the doctor had reached him; but a precipice
swallowed that good Samaritan, and only I of all who looked upon the
footprints which harrowed up the road at this dangerous point knew whose
shoes would fit those marks. God's providence, it was called, and I let
it pass for such; but it was a providence which cost me my boy and made
_you_ my heirs.'"

Silence, as sullen in character as the men who found themselves thus
openly impeached, had for some minutes now replaced the muttered
complaints which had accompanied the first portion of this denunciatory
letter. As the lawyer stopped to cast them another of those strange
looks, a gleam from old Luke's sidewise eyes startled the man next him,
who, shrugging a shoulder, passed the underhanded look on, till it had
circled the board and stopped with the man sitting opposite the crooked
sinner who had started it.

I began to have a wholesome dread of them all, and was astonished to see
the lawyer drop his hand from the bottle, which to some degree offered
itself as a possible weapon. But he knew his audience better than I did.
Though the bottle was now free for any man's taking, not a hand trembled
toward it, nor was a single glass held out.

The lawyer, with an evil smile, went on with his relentless client's
story.

"'Ye had killed my wife; ye had killed my son; but this was not enough.
Being lonesome in my great house, which was as much too large for me as
my fortune was, I had taken a child to replace the boy I had lost.
Remembering the cold blood running in the veins of those nearest me, I
chose a boy from alien stock, and for a while knew contentment again.
But as he developed and my affections strengthened, the possibility of
all my money going his way roused my brothers and sisters from the
complacency they had enjoyed since their road to fortune had been
secured by my son's death, and one day--can you recall it, Hudson? Can
you recall it, Lemuel?--the boy was brought in from the mill, and laid
at my feet dead! He had stumbled amongst the great belts, but whose was
the voice which