I heard the horse Satan whinny at our lane gate, wildly, as though in fright; and even as I went out my heart stopped with sudden fear.  He had leaped the gate at the lower end of the lane.  His bridle rein was broken, and caught at his feet as he moved about, throwing up his head in fright as much as viciousness.  I hastily looked at the saddle, but it bore no mark of anything unusual.  Not pausing to look farther, I caught the broken reins in my hand, and sprung into the saddle, spurring the horse down the lane and over the gate again, and back up the road which I knew my father must have taken.

There, at the side of the road, near the clump of blackberry vines and sumac growth, lay my father, a long dark blot, motionless, awesome, as I could see by the light of the moon, now just rising in a gap of the distant mountains.  I sprang down and ran to him, lifted his head, called to him in a voice so hoarse I did not recognize it.  I told him that it was his son had come to him, and that he must speak.  So at last, as though by sheer will he had held on to this time, he turned his gray face toward me, and as a dead man, spoke.

“Tell your mother,” he said; “Tell Meriwether—­must protect—­good-by.”

Then he said “Lizzie!” and opened wide his arms.

Presently he said, “Jack, lay my head down, please.”  I did so.  He was dead, there in the moon.

I straightened him, and put my coat across his face, and spurred back down the road again and over the gate.  But my mother already knew.  She met me at the hall, and her face was white.

“Jack,” she said, “I know!”

Then the servants came, and we brought him home, and laid him in his own great room, as the master of the house should lie when the end comes, and arrayed him like the gentleman he was.

Now came that old wire-hair, Doctor Bond, his mane standing stiff and gray over a gray face, down which tears rolled the first time known of any man.  He sent my mother away and called me to him.  And then he told me that in my father’s back were three or four pierced wounds, no doubt received from the sharp stubs of underbrushes when he fell.  But this, he said, could hardly have been the cause of death.  He admitted that the matter seemed mysterious to him.

Up to this time we had not thought of the cause of this disaster, nor pondered upon motives, were it worse than accident.  Now we began to think.  Doctor Bond felt in the pockets of my father’s coat; and so for the first time we found his account book and his wallets.  Doctor Bond and I at once went out and searched the saddle pockets my father had carried.  They were quite empty.

All this, of course, proved nothing to us.  The most that we could argue was that the horse in some way had thrown his rider, and that the fall had proved fatal; and that perhaps some wandering negro had committed the theft.  These conclusions were the next day bad for the horse Satan, whom I whipped and spurred, and rode till he trembled, meting out to him what had been given old Klingwalla, his sire, for another murdering deed like this.  In my brutal rage I hated all the world.  Like the savage I was, I must be avenged on something.  I could not believe that my father was gone, the man who had been my model, my friend, my companion all my life.