* * * * *

Two days afterward an express wagon drew up before the smithy, and a box
was delivered to Billy marked with his name. It contained a liberal
supply of child's clothing, which Lotchen recognized as hers. Little by
little Billy and his mother drew from her fragments of her history. She
remembered a big house by the water, and a little bed of
lilies-of-the-valley under a couple of pear-trees. She remembered a
colored man named Pete, but there was no response in her memory to the
words "father" and "mother," and the only woman who appeared to be
impressed on her mind was one who called her "Lassie" and gave her
horrid stuff from a bottle in a wooden spoon.

Days and weeks and years went on, and Billy Warlock's purse grew plumper
and his heart grew lighter with each of them. His smithy in the cellar
grew in dimensions and gradually he absorbed the little old house over
it. The saloon disappeared, and the room it had occupied became a parlor
for Lotchen. The lodgers went out one by one until the whole house was
Billy's dwelling.

One day when she was nearly fourteen years old, Billy received a letter
that worried him a good deal. It was dated at the Newcastle Jail in
Delaware. It read:

MY DEAR WARLOCK:

It seems to be definitely settled about my being an error of
judgment. You can see by the enclosed newspaper clipping that I
ought not to have been involved in the scheme of the creation. You
needn't mention it to anybody else. I forget what name you knew me
by, but I think it was

CEPHAS WRANGLER.

The newspaper clipping contained these words:

Nothing, therefore, remains for the Court but to pronounce the
sentence which a jury, almost wholly of your own selection, has
adjudged your fitting doom. The crime you have committed is the
most dreadful known to the law. For it there is but one penalty,
the requisition of your life in forfeit for the one you have taken.
The sentence of the Court is that you be conducted hence to the
prison from which you came, and that you be confined there until
Friday, the 18th day of March, following, and that you then,
between the hours of 7 and 11 in the morning, be hanged by the neck
until you are dead, and may God have mercy on you!

This is all that Billy Warlock knows or cares to know of the
circumstances under which Lotchen became his child. He never made the
slig