thing he did do was almost always a surprise,
and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got rattled, as
they used to put it, when known that the old man was out with his
gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily as Colonel
Crockett's coon in the story. The scheme I am going to describe to you
would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson could have plotted
the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved himself.

'I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was,
might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the man.
Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to any one but himself and
me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work to
his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had in
him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his French
wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the tribes of
the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were active in the
fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and more than one
of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than Montour's may
have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through previous
and subsequent unions; some of the wives' antecedents were quite
untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering before the
whole country was brought under civilization. My researches left me with
the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal blood present
in the genealogical make-up of the people of America, and that it is
very widely spread. The newer families have constantly intermarried with
the older, and so many of them had a strain of the native in them-and
were often rather proud of it, too, in those days. But Manderson had the
idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood, which grew much stronger,
I fancy, with the rise of the negro question after the war. He was
thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from
every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don't
think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took
a turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before
his death.'

'Had Manderson,' asked Mr Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others
started, 'any definable religious attitude?'

Marlowe considered a moment. 'None that ever I heard of,' he said.
'Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so