We took Mose back to the hotel, shut out the crowd, and gave him something to eat. He was quite out of his head and it was only by dint¹ of the most patient questioning that we finally got his story. It was, in substance, as Terry had sketched² it in the cave.
 
In obedience³ to my request, Mose had gone back after the coat, not knowing that the Colonel was before him. Suddenly, as he came near the pool he heard a scream and looked up in time to see a big negro—the one my uncle had struck with his crop—spring upon the Colonel with the cry, "It's my tu'n, now, Cunnel Gaylord. You whup me, an' I'll let you see what it feels like."
 
The Colonel turned and clinched⁴ with his assailant, and in the struggle the light was dropped. Mose, with a cry, ran forward to his master's assistance, but when the negro saw him climbing up the bank he suddenly screamed, and hurling⁵ the old man from him, turned and fled.
 
"The fellow must have taken him for the devil when he saw those eyes, and I don't wonder!" Terry interpolated at this point.
 
After the Colonel's murder, it seems that Mose, crazed by grief and fear, had watched us carry the body away, and then had stayed by the spot where his master had died. This accounted for the marks on the border of the pool. Knowing all of the intricate passages and hiding places as he did, it had been an easy matter for him to evade⁶ the party that had searched for his body. He ate the food the murderer had left, but this being exhausted⁷, he would, I haven't a doubt, have died there himself with the unreasoning faithfulness of a dog.
 
When he finished his rambling⁸ and in some places scarcely intelligible⁹ account, we sat for a moment with our eyes upon his face, fascinated by his look. Every bit of repugnance¹⁰ I had ever felt toward him had vanished, and there was left in its place only a sense of pity. Mose's cheeks were hollow, his features sharper than ever, and his face was almost pale. From underneath¹¹ his straight, black, matted hair his eyes glittered feverishly¹², and their expression of uncomprehending anguish¹³ was pitiful to see. He seemed like a dumb animal that has come into contact with death for the first time and asks the reason.
 
Terry took his eyes from Mose's face and looked down at the table with a set jaw¹⁴. I do not think that he was deriving¹⁵ as much pleasure from the sight as he had expected. We all of us experienced a feeling of relief when the doctor appeared at the door. We turned Mose over to him with instructions to do what he could for the poor fellow and to take him back to Four-Pools.
 
As the door shut behind them, the sheriff said (with a sigh, I thought), "This business proves one thing: it's never safe to lynch a man until you are sure of the facts."
 
"It proves another thing," said Terry, dryly, "which is a thing you people don't seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life."
 
We pondered this in silence for a moment, then the sheriff voiced a feeling which, to a slight extent, had been lurking¹⁶ in the background of my own consciousness, in spite of my relief at the dénouement.
 
"It's kind of disappointing when you've got your mind worked up to something big, to find in the end that there was nothing but a chance nigger at the bottom of all that mystery. Seems sort of a let-down."
 
Terry eyed him with an air of grim humor, then he leaned across the table and spoke¹⁷ with a ring of conviction that carried his message home.
 
"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel Gaylord was not a chance nigger. There was no chance about it. Colonel Gaylord killed himself. He committed suicide—as truly as if he had blown out his brains with a gun. He did it with his uncontrollable temper. The man was an egoist. He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as of supreme¹⁸ importance. He has tried to crush the life and spirit and independence from everyone about him. But once too often he wreaked¹⁹ his anger upon an innocent person—at least upon a person that for all he knew was innocent—and at one stroke his past injustices²⁰ were avenged²¹. It was not chance that killed Colonel Gaylord. It was the inevitable²² law of cause and effect. 'Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his first fit of passion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this. Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him.
 
"Oh, I've seen it a hundred times! It's character that tells. I've seen it happen to a political boss—a man whose business it was to make friends with every voter high and low. I've seen him forget, just once, and turn on a man, humiliate²³ him, wound his pride, crush him under foot and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And I've seen that man, the most insignificant²⁴ of the politician's followers²⁵, work and plot and scheme to overthrow²⁶ him; and in the end succeed. The big man never knew what struck him. He thought it was luck, chance, a turn of the wheel. He never dreamed that it was his own character hitting back. I've seen it so often, I'm a fatalist. I don't believe in chance. It was Colonel Gaylord who killed himself, and he commenced it fifty years ago."
 
"It's God's own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly.
 
The sheriff had listened to Terry's words with an anxiously reminiscent air. I wondered if he were reviewing his own political past, to see if by chance he also had unwittingly crushed a worm. He raised his eyes to Terry's face with a gleam of admiration²⁷.
 
"You've been pretty clever, Mr. Patten, in finding out the truth about this crime," he acknowledged generously. "But you couldn't have expected me to find out," he added, "for I didn't know any of the circumstances. I had never even heard that such a man existed as that chicken thief—and as to there being two ghosts instead of one, there wasn't a suggestion of it brought out at the inquest."
 
Terry looked at him with his usual slowly broadening smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but he changed his mind and—with a visible effort—shut it again.
 
"Terry," I asked, "how did you find out about the chicken thief? I confess I don't understand it yet."
 
He shrugged²⁸ his shoulders and laughed.
 
"Nothing simpler. The trouble with you people was that you were searching for something lurid²⁹, and the little common-place things which, in a case like this, are the most suggestive, you overlooked. As soon as I read the story of the crime in the papers I saw that in all probability Rad was innocent. His behavior was far too suspicious for him really to be guilty; unless he were a fool he would have covered up his tracks. There was of course the possibility that Mose had committed the murder, but in the light of his past devotion to the Colonel it did not seem likely.
 
"I had already been reading a lot of sensational³⁰ s............