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“I do know where he is,” said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came into the protection of my father’s arm, her features white like plaster; but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my father’s saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard, bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

“Then,” he said, “if you know where David is you will take his daughter to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her.”

“We shall go to him,” said my father slowly, “but he shall not return to us.”

The hunchback’s eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

“You quote the Scriptures,” he said. “Is David in a grave?”

“He is not,” replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.

“Dillworth,” he said, “it was strange that no man ever saw your brother or the horse after the night he visited you in this house.”

“It was dark,” replied the man. “He rode from this door through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

“He rode from this door,” said my father slowly, “but not through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

The hunchback began to twist his fingers.

“Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish.”

“They did vanish,” said my father.

“Now you utter fool talk!” cried Dillworth.

“I speak the living truth,” replied my father. “Your brother David and your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing – disappeared out of the sight and knowledge of men – after he rode away from your door on that fatal night.”

“Well,” said the hunchback, “since my brother David rode away from my door – and you know that – I am free of obligation for him.”

“It is Cain’s speech!” replied my father.

The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers across his forehead.

“Dillworth,” cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of the room, “is the mark there?”

The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl, the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the pistol lay.

“Dillworth,” he said calmly, “I know where he is. And the mark you felt for just now ought to be there.”

“Fool!” cried the hunchback. “If I killed him how could he ride away from the door?”

“It was a thing that puzzled me,” replied my father, “when I stood in this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery, rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child in gossip for all her days with a crime.”

“With a thief,” snarled the man.

“With a greater criminal than a thief,” replied My father. “I was not certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money.

“I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered. You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash. You sat at your father’s table in the room. Your brother stood by the wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow – the head or face would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it.”