e
negress said; and when the woman had been cared for, and at last lay
sleeping from exhaustion and, I fancied, the help of an opiate, I
questioned the servant.

Her mistress, she said, was a southern woman, and she had been her
servant since 'befo' the war,' when that mistress was a child of six.

An orphan with a small fortune, 'Mistress Susie' had married Greenback
Bob, 'Master Robert,' she called him, and had followed him and clung
to him through all his downward career of crime, as the big,
heavy-featured coloured woman had clung to 'Missis Susie.' When
prosperous, Bob was kind; when unlucky or drunk, he was cruel and
coarse. 'Missis Susie' had inherited consumption, and that and trouble
and danger had 'wo'n her life away,' as the woman said, with big tears
dropping upon her dark cheeks.

'This las',' she concluded, 'hit's been the wo'st of all. An' that
sick boy! Missis Susie prayed 'em to let him go away to the hospital,
when he was hurt and couldn't give anyone away. But they nuver heard
to Missis Susie--nuver! They wouldn't have been trapped like this if
they had.'

It was by my proposal to bring the physician--whom at an early morning
hour I had summoned to see Trent--to pass judgment upon 'Missis
Susie' also, that I won the negress to tell me something about Trent;
how at early evening he was brought in by Bob and Delbras, whom she
called Hector, and whom she evidently both feared and hated; how a
physician was called, as the young man was insensible, and how,
fortunately for them, he continued delirious for three weeks and more
while the two wounds on his head, both serious ones, were healing; how
the 'gang' had deliberately taken the risk of keeping him until he had
so far recovered as to be beyond the danger-line, knowing that they
could not safely negotiate the return to his family of a prisoner who
might die perhaps while the negotiations were pending.

She told how some one of the gang proper was always on guard in the
sick-room by day, and often by night, and that it was only since the
going away of one of the gang, Harry by name, that they had entrusted
the prisoner to her care alone.

It did not take me long to find out that the person she called Harry
was the brunette, now lying dead at the Morgue, and I saw, too, that
she did not dream of the fate that had overtaken him, although I felt
sure that the woman Susie did.

At early dawn the three men, Delbras, Bob, and Smug, or Harris, as his