ion of the mystery of Isom Chase's heir, they had reached a
perfect footing of understanding.

Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great
progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which
had come on the attorney's order speedily. It was an immense volume, as
big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and
when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked
rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons,
which, not yet determined.

The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It
reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the
farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had
been long and its rising late.

On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the
court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned of the death of Isom Chase.
The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of
board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event
which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been
prepared.

After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer
placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:

"Did you ever witness Isom Chase's will?"

Uncle John took his slate and wrote:

"Yes."

"When?"

"Thirty or forty years ago," wrote Uncle John--what was a decade more or
less to him? "When he joined the Order."

Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to
hold intelligent communication once more.

More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the
secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each
candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of
the rites.

"What a sturdy old goat that must have been!" thought the lawyer.

"Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?" read the
pasteboard under the old man's hands.

Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.

"To his son," he wrote. "Isom was the name."

"Do you know when and where that son was born?"

Uncle John's smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent
over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual,
as if he had a great deal to say.

"He never was born," he wrote, "not up to the time that I lost the
world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that