searching? I could scarcely credit my own ears. True I now remembered
they had come from these parts, still--

Turning round I eyed the house once more. How altered it looked to me!
What a murderous aspect it wore, and how dismally secret were the
tight shut windows and closely fastened doors, on one of which a rude
cross scrawled in red chalk met the eye with a mysterious
significance. Even the old pine had acquired the villainous air of
the uncanny repositor of secrets too dreadful to reveal, as it groaned
and murmured to itself in the keen east wind. Dark deeds and foul
wrong seemed written all over the fearful place, from the long
strings of black moss that clung to the worm-eaten eaves, to the worn
stone with its great blotch of something,--could it have been
blood?--that served as a threshold to the door. Suddenly with the
quickness of lightning the thought flashed across me, what could Mr.
Blake, the aristocratic representative of New York's oldest family,
have wanted in this nest of infamy? What errand of hope, fear,
despair, avarice or revenge, could have brought this superior
gentleman with his refined tastes and proudly reticent manners, so
many miles from home, to the forsaken den of a brace of hardy villains
whose name for two years now, had stood as the type of all that was
bold, bad and lawless, and for whom during the last six weeks the
prison had yawned, and the gallows hungered. Contemplation brought no
reply, and shocked at my own thoughts, I put the question by for
steadier brains than mine; and instead of trying further to solve it,
cast about how I was to gain entrance into this deserted building;
for to enter it I was more than ever determined, now that I had heard
to whom it had once belonged.

Examining with a glance the several roads that branched off in every