herefore, Sarah Jane Pepper, daughter of Sarah Thornton,
and now the wife of Hiram Gilcrest, of Cane Ridge, Bourbon County,
Kentucky, was the sole lawful heir to the estates of the said Colonel
Andrew Hite, deceased.

Mr. Drane then went on to give an account of the manner of Mary Page's
death, and to explain that it was not until immediately after her
burial at Centerton that her husband, Marshall Page, accompanied by his
brother and sister-in-law and his little stepson, had gone on into
Kentucky. Enclosed in Drane's letter was a loose slip of paper
containing a copy of the half-effaced inscription upon the oak slab
which marked the grave at Centerton. The slip was headed "Copied at
Centerton by James Anson Drane, from the slab marking the grave of Mary
Belle Hollis Page."

This communication served to awaken Abner from his apathy; for the
statement conveyed in it respecting the time and place of Mary Page's
death, if not proven false, would tend to very seriously reflect upon
the integrity of Richard Dudley, executor of the Hite will, and would
probably render him liable to arrest and trial on the charge of being
party to a fraud.

Abner was thoroughly convinced that the statement in Drane's letter,
concerning Mary's death, was false. He had full confidence in Richard
Dudley's clear-sightedness and uprightness. Moreover, his own intuition
and his faint recollection of episodes in his own early life made him
sure that his mother had died that August night in the stockade
fortress of Bryan Station. These dim, tantalizing recollections which
had been first partially aroused that November night by Gilcrest's and
Rogers' recital of the horrors of the famous Indian uprising of 1782,
had been kindled into stronger life by what his uncle had recently told
him of the attack upon the cabin of the Pages, the flight to Bryan's,
the death there of Mary Page, and the return of her little orphaned boy
to his Lawsonville people. But, although his faith in his uncle's honor
and in his own intuitions and memories were to himself "confirmation
strong as Holy Writ," they would not be accepted as evidence in a court
of law. Hence it now behooved him and Dr. Dudley to learn something
more of Marshall Page's brother.

Neither Richard nor Rachel Dudley knew anything of the man--not even
his Christian name.

"This Page and his wife did not start for Kentucky from Lawsonville,"
Dr. Dudley said. "They came from Maryland, and joined Marsha