d incapable of speech.

"Is this truth?" he asked at length.

"God's truth," Ralph answered.

"The kerchief--what color was it?"

"Yellow."

"Any name or mark on it? I have it to this day."

"None--wait; there was a rose pricked out in worsted on one corner."

The sheriff got up, with lips compressed and wide eyes. He made for
the door, and pulled at it with wasted violence. It was opened from
the other side by the under gaoler, and the sheriff rushed out.

Without turning to the right or left, he went direct to the common
gaol. There, in the cell which Ralph had occupied between the first
trial and the second one, Mark Garth, the perjurer, lay imprisoned.

"You hell-hound," cried the sheriff, grasping him by the hair and
dragging him into the middle of the floor. "I have found out your
devilish treachery," he said, speaking between gusts of breath. "Did
you not tell me that it was Ray who struck me this blow--this"
(beating with his palm the scar on his brow)? "It was a lie--a damned
lie!"

"It was," said the man, glaring back, with eyes afire with fury.

"And did you not say it was Ray who carried me into their camp--an
insensible prisoner?"

"That was a lie also," the man gasped, never struggling to release
himself from the grip that held him on the floor.

"And did you not set me on to compass the death of this man, but for
whom I should now myself be dead?"

"You speak with marvellous accuracy, Master Lawson," returned the
perjurer.

The sheriff looked down at him for a moment, and then flung him away.

"Man, man! do you know what you have done?" he cried in an altered
tone. "You have charged my soul with your loathsome crime."

The perjurer curled his lip.

"It was _I_ who gave you that blow," he said, with a cruel smile,
pointing with his thin finger at the sheriff's forehead. It was false.

"You devil!" cried the sheriff, "and you have killed the man who saved
your brother's life, and consorted with one of two who would have been
his murderers."

"I was myself the second," said the man, with fiendish calmness. It
was the truth. "I carry the proof of it here," he added, touching a
place at the back of his head where the hair, being shorn away,
disclosed a deep mark.

The sheriff staggered back with frenzied eyes and dilated nostrils.
His breast heaved; he seemed unable to catch his breath.

The man looked at him with a mocking smile struggling over clinched
teeth. As if a reptile had