first and discover
whereabouts body. Other man refuses talk so far. Check any movement
Cross-Roads. This clears Skillett, etc. Come over on 9.15."

The telegram was signed by Homer and by Barrett, the superintendent of
police at Rouen.

"It's all a mistake, boys," the lawyer said, as he handed the paper
to Watts and Parker for inspection. "The ladies at the judge's
were mistaken, that's all, and this proves it. It's easy enough to
understand: they were frightened by the storm, and, watching a fence
a quarter-mile away by flashes of lightning, any one would have been
confused, and imagined all the horrors on earth. I don't deny but what I
believed it for a while, and I don't deny but the Cross-Roads is pretty
tough, but you've done a good deal here already, to-day, and we're
saved in time from a mistake that would have turned out mighty bad. This
settles it. Homer got a wire from Rouen to come over there, soon as
they got track of the first man; that was when we saw him on the Rouen
accommodation."

A slightly cracked voice, yet a huskily tuneful one, was lifted
quaveringly on the air from the roadside, where an old man and a yellow
dog sat in the dust together, the latter reprieved at the last moment,
his surprised head rakishly garnished with a hasty wreath of dog-fennel
daisies.

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
While we go marching on!"

Three-quarters of an hour later, the inhabitants of the Cross-Roads,
saved, they knew not how; guilty; knowing nothing of the fantastic
pendulum of opinion, which, swung by the events of the day, had marked
the fatal moment of guilt, now on others, now on them, who deserved
it--these natives and refugees, conscious of atrocity, dumfounded by a
miracle, thinking the world gone mad, hovered together in a dark, ragged
mass at the crossing corners, while the skeleton of the rotting buggy
in the slough rose behind them against the face of the west. They peered
with stupified eyes through the smoky twilight.

From afar, faintly through the gloaming, came mournfully to their ears
the many-voiced refrain--fainter, fainter:

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
John Brown's body lies--mould--
..... we go march.... on."

CHAPTER XII. JERRY THE TELLER At midnight a small brougham stopped at
the gates of the city hospital in Rouen. A short distance ahead, the