“Why, who are you?” cried the girl, in a tremulous voice.
“Ned Mitchell, brother to Nellie Mitchell, who was done away with here ten years ago. And I’m here to make the man who murdered her swing for it!”
CHAPTER XIV.
Olivia Denison was by no means a nervous or weak-minded girl. On learning that the man who stood before her was the brother of Nellie Mitchell, she did not scream or stagger back, or give any outward sign of the shock she felt, except to bite her lips, which had begun to tremble and twitch, as she bowed her head in acknowledgment of the information. But, none the less, she was instantly possessed by a much greater terror than if this unexpected avenger had been a fierce-looking personage with flashing eyes and a melodramatic roll in his voice. She felt that there would be no softening this hard-headed colonist, who took the punishment of his sister’s betrayer as “all in the day’s work,” and announced his intention of getting him hanged with the same dispassionate decision with which he would have resolved on the sale of a flock of sheep. And at the same time she felt for the first time fully conscious that even the absolute knowledge of Vernon Brander’s guilt would not suffice to stifle her interest in him.
Quietly as she took his sensational announcement, Ned Mitchell was shrewd enough to know that the young lady was greatly shocked by it, and her bearing filled him with genuine admiration. But his first attempt to soften the blow was scarcely well worded.
“Come, Miss Denison, there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and a young lady of your spirit is too good to waste half a sigh on any man, let alone a parson. There’s nobody fit to mate with you in this played-out old country; what you want is a lad who can sit a buckjumper, or ride five hundred miles without a wink of sleep except what he gets in the saddle. That’s your sort.”
“Is it?” said Olivia tranquilly. “Perhaps so. But I assure you, Mr. Mitchell, I can exist a few more years without a mate at all, and that it is no frantic desire to get married which makes me anxious to see one of my friends cleared of a charge of which I believe him to be innocent.”
“Well said. That’s what a friend should believe. But if your friend has quite a free conscience about St. Cuthbert’s churchyard and anything that may ever have taken place in it, can you suggest a reason for the gate’s being always locked?”
“I suppose it is to prevent the sheep getting in,” said Olivia, regretting the feeble suggestion the next moment.
“Certainly the sheep can’t pick a lock, but, then, neither could they lift an ordinary latch.”