n to you?"

"No," said Hannibal.

"Took you to raise, did he--and abused you--infernal hypocrite!" cried
the judge with righteous wrath.

"He tried to get me away from my Uncle Bob. He's been following us since
we crossed the mountains."

"Where is your Uncle Bob?"

"He's dead." And the child began to weep bitterly. Much puzzled, the
judge regarded him in silence for a moment, then bent and lifted him
into his lap.

"There, my son--" he said soothingly. "Now you tell me when he died, and
all about it."

"He were killed. It were only yesterday, and I can't forget him! I don't
want to--but it hurts--it hurts terrible!" Hannibal buried his head in
the judge's shoulder and sobbed aloud. Presently his small hands stole
about the judge's neck, and that gentleman experienced a strange thrill
of pleasure.

"Tell me how he died, Hannibal," he urged gently. In a voice broken by
sobs the child began the story of their flight, a confused narrative,
which the judge followed with many a puzzled shake of the head. But as
he reached his climax--that cry he had heard at the tavern, the men in
the lane with their burden--he became more and more coherent and his
ideas clothed themselves in words of dreadful simplicity and directness.
The judge shuddered. "Can such things be?" he murmured at last.

"You won't let him take me?"

"I never unsay my words," said the judge grandly. "With God's help
I'll be the instrument for their destruction." He frowned with a
preternatural severity. Eh--if he could turn a trick like that, it would
pull him up! There would be no more jeers and laughter.

What credit and standing it would give him! His thoughts slipped
along this fresh channel. What a prosecution he would conduct--what a
whirlwind of eloquence he would loose! He began to breathe hard. His
name should go from end to end of the state! No man could be great
without opportunity--for years he had known this--but here was
opportunity at last! Then he remembered what Mahaffy had told him of the
man on the raft. This Slosson's tavern was probably on the upper waters
of the Elk. Yancy had been thrown in the river and had been picked up in
a dying condition. "Hannibal," he said, "Solomon Mahaffy, who was here
last night, told me he saw down at the river landing, a man who had been
fished up out of the Elk--a man who had been roughly handled."

"Were it my Uncle Bob?" cried Hannibal, lifting a swollen face to his.

"Dear lad, I don't kno