“Don’t send that message!” said Dick, in a hoarse voice;—­“do what you like with my arm, but don’t send that message!  Let me go,—­I can walk, and I’ll be off from this place.  There’s nobody hurt but myself.  Damn the shoulder!—­let me go!  You shall never hear of me again!”

Mr. Bernard came forward.

“My friends,” he said, “I am not injured,—­seriously, at least.  Nobody need complain against this man, if I don’t.  The Doctor will treat him like a human being, at any rate; and then, if he will go, let him.  There are too many witnesses against him here for him to want to stay.”

The Doctor, in the mean time, without saying a word to all this, had got a towel round the shoulder and chest and another round the arm, and had the bone replaced in a very few minutes.

“Abel, put Cassia into the new chaise,” he said, quietly.  “My friends and neighbors, leave this young man to me.”

“Colonel Sprowle, you’re a justice of the peace,” said Deacon Soper, “and you know what the law says in cases like this.  It a’n’t so clear that it won’t have to come afore the Grand Jury, whether we will or no.”

“I guess we’ll set that j’int to-morrow mornin’,” said Colonel Sprowle,—­which made a laugh at the Deacon’s expense, and virtually settled the question.

“Now trust this young man in my care,” said the old Doctor, “and go home and finish your naps.  I knew him when he was a boy and I’ll answer for it, he won’t trouble you any more.  The Dudley blood makes folks proud, I can tell you, whatever else they are.”

The good people so respected and believed in the Doctor that they left the prisoner with him.

Presently, Cassia, the fast Morgan mare, came up to the front-door, with the wheels of the new, light chaise flashing behind her in the moonlight.  The Doctor drove Dick forty miles at a stretch that night, out of the limits of the State.

“Do you want money?” he said, before he left him.

Dick told him the secret of his golden belt.

“Where shall I send your trunk after you from your uncle’s?”

Dick gave him a direction to a seaport town to which he himself was going, to take passage for a port in South America.

“Good-bye, Richard,” said the Doctor.  “Try to learn something from to-night’s lesson.”

The Southern impulses in Dick’s wild blood overcame him, and he kissed the old Doctor on both cheeks, crying as only the children of the sun can cry, after the first hours in the dewy morning of life.  So Dick Venner disappears from this story.  An hour after dawn, Cassia pointed her fine ears homeward, and struck into her square, honest trot, as if she had not been doing anything more than her duty during her four hours’ stretch of the last night.

Abel was not in the habit of questioning the Doctor’s decisions.