“Never mind the mule, Bob,” said Crenshaw.

“If I can’t make the gentleman believe in the everlasting slowness of that mule of mine, my story ain’t worth a hill of beans,” said Yancy.

“The extraordinary slowness of the mule is accepted without question, Mr. Yancy,” said Bladen.

“I’m obliged to you,” rejoined Yancy, and for a brief moment he appeared to commune with himself, then he continued.  “A mile out of town I heard some one sloshing through the rain after me; it was dark by that time and I couldn’t see who it was, so I pulled up and waited, and then I made out it was a woman.  She spoke when she was alongside the cart and says, ’Can you drive me on to the Barony?’ and it came to me it was the same woman I’d seen leave the stage.  When I got down to help her into the cart I saw she was toting a child in her arms.”

“What did the woman look like, Bob?” said Crenshaw.

“She wa’n’t exactly old and she wa’n’t young by no manner of means; I remember saying to myself, that child ain’t yo’s, whose ever it is.  Well, sir, I was willing enough to talk, but she wa’n’t, she hardly spoke until we came to the red gate, when she says, ‘Stop, if you please, I’ll walk the rest of the way.’  Mind you, she’d known without a word from me we were at the Barony.  She give me a dollar, and the last I seen of her she was hurrying through the rain toting the child in her arms.”

Mr. Crenshaw took up the narrative.

“The niggers say the old general almost had a fit when he saw her.  Aunt Alsidia let her into the house; I reckon if Joe had been alive she wouldn’t have got inside that door, spite of the night!”

“Well?” said Bladen.

“When morning come she was gone, but the child done stayed behind; we always reckoned the lady walked back to Fayetteville sometime befo’ day and took the stage.  I’ve heard Aunt Alsidia tell as how the old general said that morning, pale and shaking like, ’You’ll find a boy asleep in the red room; he’s to be fed and cared fo’, but keep him out of my sight.  His name is Hannibal Wayne Hazard.’  That is all the general ever said on the matter.  He never would see the boy, never asked after him even, and the boy lived in the back of the house, with the niggers to look after him.  Now, sir, you know as much as we know, which is just next door to nothing.”

The old general was borne across what had once been the west lawn to his resting-place in the neglected acre where the dead and gone of his race lay, and the record of the family was complete, as far as any man knew.  Crenshaw watched the grave take shape with a melancholy for which he found no words, yet if words could have come from the mist of ideas in which his mind groped vaguely he would have said that for themselves the deeds of the Quintards had been given the touch of finality, and that whether for good or for evil, the consequences, like the ripple which rises from the surface of placid waters when a stone is dropped, still survived somewhere in the world.