awe-stricken, half-amused, yet all discreetly silent loungers, followed
by his wondering but gloomy client. At the door they parted,--the
Colonel tiptoeing towards his office as if dancing with rage, the
stranger darkly plodding through the stifling dust in the opposite
direction, with what might have been a faint suggestion to his
counselor, that the paths of the homicide did not lie beside the still
cool waters.


CHAPTER II.


The house of Captain Masterton Dows, at Pineville, Kentucky, was a fine
specimen of Southern classical architecture, being an exact copy of
Major Fauquier's house in Virginia, which was in turn only a slight
variation from a well-known statesman's historical villa in Alabama,
that everybody knew was designed from a famous Greek temple on the
Piraeus. Not but that it shared this resemblance with the County Court
House and the Odd Fellows' Hall, but the addition of training jessamine
and Cherokee rose to the columns of the portico, and over the colonnade
leading to its offices, showed a certain domestic distinction. And the
sky line of its incongruously high roof was pleasantly broken against
adjacent green pines, butternut, and darker cypress.

A nearer approach showed the stuccoed gateposts--whose red brick
core was revealed through the dropping plaster--opening in a wall of
half-rough stone, half-wooden palisade, equally covered with shining
moss and parasitical vines, which hid a tangled garden left to its own
unkempt luxuriance. Yet there was a reminiscence of past formality
and even pretentiousness in a wide box-bordered terrace and one or two