“Where is your Uncle Bob?”

“He’s dead.”  And the child began to weep bitterly.  Much puzzled, the judge regarded him in silence for a moment, then bent and lifted him into his lap.

“There, my son—­” he said soothingly.  “Now you tell me when he died, and all about it.”

“He were killed.  It were only yesterday, and I can’t forget him!  I don’t want to—­but it hurts—­it hurts terrible!” Hannibal buried his head in the judge’s shoulder and sobbed aloud.  Presently his small hands stole about the judge’s neck, and that gentleman experienced a strange thrill of pleasure.

“Tell me how he died, Hannibal,” he urged gently.  In a voice broken by sobs the child began the story of their flight, a confused narrative, which the judge followed with many a puzzled shake of the head.  But as he reached his climax—­that cry he had heard at the tavern, the men in the lane with their burden—­he became more and more coherent and his ideas clothed themselves in words of dreadful simplicity and directness.  The judge shuddered.  “Can such things be?” he murmured at last.

“You won’t let him take me?”

“I never unsay my words,” said the judge grandly.  “With God’s help I’ll be the instrument for their destruction.”  He frowned with a preternatural severity.  Eh—­if he could turn a trick like that, it would pull him up!  There would be no more jeers and laughter.

What credit and standing it would give him!  His thoughts slipped along this fresh channel.  What a prosecution he would conduct —­what a whirlwind of eloquence he would loose!  He began to breathe hard.  His name should go from end to end of the state!  No man could be great without opportunity—­for years he had known this—­but here was opportunity at last!  Then he remembered what Mahaffy had told him of the man on the raft.  This Slosson’s tavern was probably on the upper waters of the Elk.  Yancy had been thrown in the river and had been picked up in a dying condition.  “Hannibal,” be said, “Solomon Mahaffy, who was here last night, told me he saw down at the river landing, a man who had been fished up out of the Elk—­a man who had been roughly handled.”

“Were it my Uncle Bob?” cried Hannibal, lifting a swollen face to his.

“Dear lad, I don’t know,” said the judge sympathetically.  “Some people on a raft had picked him up out of the river.  He was unconscious and no one knew him.  He was apparently a stranger in these parts.”

“It were Uncle Bob!  It were Uncle Bob—­I know it were my Uncle Bob!  I must go find him!” and Hannibal slipped from the judge’s lap and ran for his rifle and bundle.

“Stop a bit!” cried the judge.  “He was taken on past here, and he was badly injured.  Now, if it was your Uncle Bob, he’ll come back the moment he is able to travel.  Meantime, you must remain under my protection while we investigate this man Slosson.”