The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

“To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,” continued my father, “the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs.  Look, Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled edge you can scrape off the indigo!”

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it.  His head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his shoulders.  Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

“The coins appear,” he said.  “My brother David must be in Baltimore behind this suit.”

“He is not in Baltimore,” said my father.

“Perhaps you know where he is,” cried the hunchback, “since you speak with such authority.”

“I do know where he is,” said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair.  And the girl came into the protection of my father’s arm, her features white like plaster; but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing that might be coming.  After the one long abandonment to tears in my father’s saddle she had got herself in hand.  She had gone, like the princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard, bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

“Then,” he said, “if you know where David is you will take his daughter to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her.”

“We shall go to him,” said my father slowly, “but he shall not return to us.”

The hunchback’s eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

“You quote the Scriptures,” he said.  “Is David in a grave?”

“He is not,” replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first thrust of his opponent.  But my father met him with an even voice.

“Dillworth,” he said, “it was strange that no man ever saw your brother or the horse after the night he visited you in this house.”

“It was dark,” replied the man.  “He rode from this door through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

“He rode from this door,” said my father slowly, “but not through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

The hunchback began to twist his fingers.

“Where did he ride then?  A man and a horse could not vanish.”

“They did vanish,” said my father.

“Now you utter fool talk!” cried Dillworth.

“I speak the living truth,” replied my father.  “Your brother David and your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing — disappeared out of the sight and knowledge of men — after he rode away from your door on that fatal night.”