d my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun
a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.

The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its
base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

"To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,"
continued my father, "the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your
man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look,
Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled
edge you can scrape off the indigo!"

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His
head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his
shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

"The coins appear," he said. "My brother David must be in Baltimore
behind this suit."

"He is not in Baltimore," said my father.

"Perhaps you know where he is," cried the hunchback, "since you speak
with such authority."

"I do know where he is," said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came
into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster;
but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing
that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my
father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the
princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was
burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard,
bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

"Then," he said, "if you know where David is you will take his daughter
to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her."

"We shall go to him," said my father slowly, "but he shall not return to
us."

The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

"You quote the Scriptures," he said. "Is David in a grave?"

"He is not," replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first
thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.

"Dillworth," he said, "it was strange that no man ever saw your brother
or the horse after the night he visited you in this house."

"It was dark," replied the man. "He rode from this door through the gap
in the mountains into Maryland."

"He rode from this door," said my father slowly, "but not through the
ga