s as if footsteps, heavy,
and wet with dark-coloured moisture, had trodden there. They followed
the tracks, and came to a place where many low bushes growing close
together formed a kind of thicket. Almost buried in this, the figure of
a man lying upon the ground filled them for a moment with a new
consternation--but this was no lifeless body. They dragged it out--a
squalid, miserable object, with bleared eyes and red disfigured face, a
drunken, half-imbecile Indian.

He was so overcome, indeed, with the heavy sleep of intoxication that
even when they made him stand up, he seemed neither to see anything nor
to hear the questions of the men who knew him and called him by his
name. But there were answers to their questions in another shape than
that of words. The hatchet that lay beside him and the stains of blood
still wet upon his ragged clothing were conclusive evidence.

They led him away, after the little procession which had gone on with
the dray and its load, but he neither resisted, nor indeed spoke at all.
He seemed not to understand what was going on; and the men about him
were for the moment too full of horror, and of that awe which belongs to
the sight of death, to be much disposed to question him.

So they took murderer and victim both to the sawmill, and there waited,
dreading to carry their ghastly load into the town till such warning as
was possible had been given.

Meantime Harry Scott, with his mind full of his mission, drove towards
Cacouna. He saw nothing of the people he passed, or who passed him; he
saw only the sight he had just left, except when there rushed into his
recollection for a moment the wedding-day scarcely six weeks ago, and
the certainty of happiness which then seemed to wait both bride and
bridegroom. And now? "Poor Bella!" broke from his lips, and he shuddered
as he fancied, not Bella, but his cousin Magdalen crushed down in her
youth by such a blow as this. But the momentary, fanciful connection of
the two girls, did but make him the more tender of the young widow.
"Widow!" he said the word half aloud, it seemed so unnatural, so
incredible. But while he thought, he was drawing very near his
destination; for he had at once decided that the proper thing to do was
to find Mr. Bellairs, and leave him to carry the news as he might think
best to his sister-in-law. At the door of the lawyer's office,
therefore, the reluctant messenger stopped, and went in with his face
still full of the