ant was recognised in the dirk of the youth, which,
smeared with blood as it had been left by Rivers, had been found upon
the body. Rivers had but little to do. He contrived, however, to do
nothing himself. The warrant of Pippin, as magistrate, was procured, and
the two officers commissioned by the sheriff went off in pursuit of the
supposed murderer, against whom the indignation of all the village was
sufficiently heightened by the recollection of the close intimacy
existing between Ralph and Forrester, and the nobly characteristic
manner in which the latter had volunteered to do his fighting with
Rivers. The murdered man had, independent of this, no small popularity
of his own, which brought out for him a warm and active sympathy highly
creditable to his memory. Old Allen, too, suffered deeply, not less on
his own than his daughter's account. She, poor girl, had few words, and
her sorrow, silent, if not tearless, was confined to the solitude of her
own chamber.

In the prosecution of the affair against Ralph, there was but one person
whose testimony could have availed him, and that person was Lucy Munro.
As the chief particular in evidence, and that which established the
strong leading presumption against him, consisted in the discovery of
his dagger alongside the body of the murdered man, and covered with his
blood; it was evident that she who could prove the loss of the dagger by
the youth, and its finding by Munro, prior to the event, and
unaccompanied by any tokens of crime, would not only be able to free the
person suspected, at least from this point of suspicion, but would be
enabled to place its burden elsewhere, and with the most conclusive
distinctness.

This was a dilemma which Rivers and Munro did not fail to consider. The
private deliberation, for an hour, of the two conspirators, determined
upon the course which for mutual safety they were required to pursue;
and Munro gave his niece due notice to prepare for an immediate
departure with her aunt and himself, on some plausible pretence, to
another portion of the country.

To such a suggestion, as Lucy knew not the object, she offered no
objection; and a secret departure was effected of the three, who, after
a lonely ride of several hours through a route circuitously chosen to
mislead, were safely brought to the sheltered and rocky abiding-place of
the robbers, as we have already described it. Marks of its offensive
features, however, had been so modifie