id
cloud of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He
had already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial
occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery
of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again,
as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or
corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young
girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged
from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.

"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"

Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.

"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went
on. "Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."

In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that
the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or
frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain
kind of pleased curiosity.

"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went
into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along
at a brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I
found."

It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met
Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in
the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so
incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying
there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity
to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him
with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could
only stare at it blankly.

"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"

Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have
seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but
presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand
protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way
and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of
cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite
angles to the sky. It was a dead man! So palpably dead that life seemed
to have taken flight from his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and
degraded by them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would
have been less insulting to humanity. Th