an, if I don't. The Doctor will treat him
like a human being, at any rate; and then, if he will go, let him. There
are too many witnesses against him here for him to want to stay."

The Doctor, in the mean time, without saying a word to all this, had got
a towel round the shoulder and chest and another round the arm, and had
the bone replaced in a very few minutes.

"Abel, put Cassia into the new chaise," he said, quietly. "My friends
and neighbors, leave this young man to me."

"Colonel Sprowle, you're a justice of the peace," said Deacon Soper, "and
you know what the law says in cases like this. It a'n't so clear that it
won't have to come afore the Grand Jury, whether we will or no."

"I guess we'll set that j'int to-morrow mornin'," said Colonel
Sprowle,--which made a laugh at the Deacon's expense, and virtually
settled the question.

"Now trust this young man in my care," said the old Doctor, "and go home
and finish your naps. I knew him when he was a boy and I'll answer for
it, he won't trouble you any more. The Dudley blood makes folks proud, I
can tell you, whatever else they are."

The good people so respected and believed in the Doctor that they left
the prisoner with him.

Presently, Cassia, the fast Morgan mare, came up to the front-door, with
the wheels of the new, light chaise flashing behind her in the moonlight.
The Doctor drove Dick forty miles at a stretch that night, out of the
limits of the State.

"Do you want money?" he said, before he left him.

Dick told him the secret of his golden belt.

"Where shall I send your trunk after you from your uncle's?"

Dick gave him a direction to a seaport town to which he himself was
going, to take passage for a port in South America.

"Good-bye, Richard," said the Doctor. "Try to learn something from
to-night's lesson."

The Southern impulses in Dick's wild blood overcame him, and he kissed
the old Doctor on both cheeks, crying as only the children of the sun can
cry, after the first hours in the dewy morning of life. So Dick Venner
disappears from this story. An hour after dawn, Cassia pointed her fine
ears homeward, and struck into her square, honest trot, as if she had not
been doing anything more than her duty during her four hours' stretch of
the last night.

Abel was not in the habit of questioning the Doctor's decisions.

"It's all right," he said to Mr. Bernard. "The fellah 's Squire Venner's
relation, anyhaow. Don't you want