“Didn’t I see it in his own hand?”

Here was a fearful position!  The dark loft, the lonely shanty miles away from any other habitation, the mysterious allusions to the possession of property, all naturally combined to raise the most dreadful suspicions in the mind of the solitary traveller.  Strange to say, this conversation had not the terrible effect upon me which might be supposed.  It was evident that my old friends, father and mother of Mrs. C——­, occupied the loft in company with me, and the mention of that most suggestive word, “crathure,” was sufficient to neutralize all suspicions connected with the lonely surroundings of the place.  It was, in fact, a drop of that much-desired “crathure” that the old couple were so anxious to obtain.

About three o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday the 17th July I left the house of Mr. Connelly, and journeyed back to Abercrombie in the stage waggon from St. Cloud.  I had as a fellow-passenger the captain of the “International” steamboat, whose acquaintance was quickly made.  He had received my letter at Pomme-de-Terre, and most kindly offered his pony and cart for our joint conveyance to George town that evening; so, having waited only long enough at Abercrombie to satisfy hunger and get ready the Red River cart, we left Mr. Nolan’s door some little time before sunset, and turning north along the river held our way towards Georgetown.  The evening was beautifully fine and clear; the plug trotted steadily on, and darkness soon wrapped its mantle around the prairie.  My new acquaintance had many questions to ask and much information to impart, and although a Red River cart is not the easiest mode of conveyance to one who sits amidships between the wheels, still when I looked to the northern skies and saw the old pointers marking our course almost due north, and thought that at last I was launched fair on a road whose termination was the goal for which I had longed so earnestly, I little recked the rough jolting of the wheels whose revolutions brought me closer to my journey’s end.  Shortly after leaving Abercrombie we passed a small creek in whose leaves and stagnant waters mosquitoes were numerous.

“If the mosquitoes let us travel,” said my companion, as we emerged upon the prairie again, “we should reach Georgetown to breakfast.”

“If the mosquitoes let us travel?” thought I.  “Surely he must be joking!”

I little knew then the significance of the captain’s words.  I thought that my experiences of mosquitoes in Indian jungles and Irrawaddy swamps, to say nothing of my recent wanderings by Mississippi forests, had taught me something about these pests; but I was doomed to learn a lesson that night and the following which will cause me never to doubt the possibility of anything, no matter how formidable or how unlikely it may appear, connected with mosquitoes.  It was about ten o’clock at night when there rose close to the south-west a small dark cloud scarcely visible above the horizon.