To be brief, she told me the whole story. When she reached the spring she had found the old man bleeding and still breathing. He died in her arms. The men, who had gone back into the laurel to open the valise, came back upon her. The negro was a desperate character, well known in the county. He had died two years later. The other man was masked and thoroughly disguised. He had stopped the negro when he would have killed her, and after a few minutes' consultation had whispered to him the terms upon which she was allowed to escape.
"You did not hear the white man's voice?"
"Bring me the letters you have received from him."
She brought two miserably spelled and written scrawls on soiled bits of paper. It was the writing of an educated man, poorly disguised. He threatened to meet her speedily, warned her that he had spies constantly about her.
"That is all the evidence you can give me?"
"All." She rose to go. I held the door open for her, when she hesitated.
"There was something more--a mere trifle."
"Yes. But most likely the one thing that I want."
"I returned to the spring again and again for months afterward. People thought I was mad. I may have been; but I found there one day a bit of reddish glass with a curious mark on it."
She brought it to me. It was a fragment of engraved sardonyx, apparently part of a seal; the upper part of a head was cut upon it; the short hairs curving forward on the low forehead showed that the head was that of Hercules.
Some old recollection rose in my brain, beginning, as I may say, to gnaw uncertainly. I went to my room for a few minutes to collect myself, and then sought Beardsley.
He was pacing up and down the walk to the stables, agitated as though he had been the murderer.
"Well, Floyd, well! What chance is there? What have you discovered?"
"Everything. One moment. I have a question or two to ask you. About ten years ago you commissioned me to buy for you in New York a seal--an intaglio of great value--a head of Hercules, as I remember. What did you do with it?"
"Gave it to Job Scheffer, William's father. Will has it now, though I think it is broken."
"Very well. What have Dr. Scheffer's habits been, by the way? Was he as fond of turning the cards as the other young fellows?"