Two or three other witnesses were called, but they were of the main road, and the main road had nothing to show further than that it had been travelled upon by Lewis Rand and his negro boy.  They had not seen Mr. Ludwell Cary since he rode to Richmond early in the summer.  Yes, they were sure they had seen Mr. Rand and his negro boy—­but the clouds were dark, and the dust blowing so that you had to hold your head down, and people were thinking of getting indoors.  The boy was riding a mare with a white foot.

“I think we can leave the main road, gentlemen,” declared the coroner.  “Now the river road and the stream where this thing was done—­”

Indian Run—­where did Indian Run come from or lead to, and who might have been upon that lonely road, or lurking in the laurel and hemlock that clothed the banks of the stream?  Three miles up the water was a camping-ground used by gypsies; at a greater distance down the stream a straggling settlement of poor whites, long looked at askance by the county.  It might be that some wandering gypsy, some Ishmaelite with a grudge—­The enquiry turned again to Fairfax Cary.

“When you went on, Mr. Cary, from Elm Tree, you too supposed that your brother would follow by the same road?  You thought—­”

“I did not think at all,” answered Cary harshly.  “I was lost in my own self and my own concerns.  I was a selfish and heedless wretch, and I hurried away without a thought or care.  What he told me I forgot at the time.  But I have remembered it since.  He told me that he would take the river road.”

“And on your own way home you repeated that to no one?”

“To no one.  I never spoke of him, I do not know that I ever thought of him from Elm Tree to Greenwood.  Oh, my brother!”

A sigh like the wind over corn went through the room.  The coroner bent forward.  “Mr. Cary, can you think of any one who bore him ill-will—­a runaway negro, perhaps, or some vagrant who might have been along that stream?”

“No.  His slaves loved him.  We had no runaways.  I do not believe there is a man on Indian Run who would have touched him.”

“Mr. Cary, had he any enemy?”

“He had one.  He sits yonder.  You have heard his testimony.”

The court room murmured again.  The old rivalry between Lewis Rand and Ludwell Cary, the antagonism of years, and the fact of a duel were sufficiently in men’s minds—­but what of it all?  The duel was a year gone by; political animosities in Virginia might be, and often were, bitter enough, but they led no further than to such a meeting.  The coroner looked disturbed.  The murmur was followed by a curious hush; but if for an instant an idea was poised in the air of the court room, it did not descend, it was banished as preposterous.  The moment’s silence was broken by Lewis Rand.  From his place at the side of the room he spoke with a grave simplicity and straightforwardness, characteristic and impressive, familiar to most there who had heard him before now, in this court room, on questions of life and death.  “Everything is to be pardoned to Mr. Fairfax Cary’s most natural grief.  My testimony, sir, is as I gave it.”