gentleman experienced a strange thrill of pleasure.

"Tell me how he died, Hannibal," he urged gently. In a voice
broken by sobs the child began the story of their flight, a
confused narrative, which the judge followed with many a puzzled
shake of the head. But as he reached his climax--that cry he had
heard at the tavern, the men in the lane with their burden--he
became more and more coherent and his ideas clothed themselves in
words of dreadful simplicity and directness. The judge
shuddered. "Can such things be?" he murmured at last.

"You won't let him take me?"

"I never unsay my words," said the judge grandly. "With God's
help I'll be the instrument for their destruction." He frowned
with a preternatural severity. Eh--if he could turn a trick like
that, it would pull him up! There would be no more jeers and
laughter.

What credit and standing it would give him! His thoughts slipped
along this fresh channel. What a prosecution he would conduct
--what a whirlwind of eloquence he would loose! He began to
breathe hard. His name should go from end to end of the state!
No man could be great without opportunity--for years he had known
this--but here was opportunity at last! Then he remembered what
Mahaffy had told him of the man on the raft. This Slosson's
tavern was probably on the upper waters of the Elk. Yancy had
been thrown in the river and had been picked up in a dying
condition. "Hannibal," be said, "Solomon Mahaffy, who was here
last night, told me he saw down at the river landing, a man who