“The clerk told me that after making these next fifteen entries of buried parties—buried the evening after these last twelve—he went away to see about something. When he came back the next morning this name was written in the superintendent’s hand. He did not know what to think of it, so he concluded to ask the superintendent; but in the course of the day he heard that he was mad and in confinement, as I have told you.”
“Then you mean that this is not an entry of a death at all.”
“Yes. The fact is, the superintendent for some reason got it into his head that this Brandon”—and he pointed to Edith’s name—“had been buried alive. He brooded over the name, and among other things wrote it down here at the end of the list for the day. That’s the way in which my predecessor accounted for it.”
“It is a very natural one,” said Brandon.
“Quite so.” The clerk let it stand. You see, if he had erased it, he might have been overhauled, and there would have been a committee. He was afraid of that; so he thought it better to say nothing about it. He wouldn’t have told me, only he said that a party came here once for a list of all the dead of the Tecumseh, and he copied all out, including this doubtful one. He thought that he had done wrong, and therefore told me, so that if any particular inquiries were ever made I might know what to say.”
“Are there many mistakes in these records?”
{Illustration: “A STRANGE FEELING PASSED OVER BRANDON. HE STEPPED FORWARD."}
“I dare say there are a good many in the list for 1846. There was so much confusion that names got changed, and people died whose names could only be conjectured by knowing who had recovered. As some of those that recovered or had not been sick slipped away secretly, of course there was inaccuracy.”
Brandon had nothing more to ask. He thanked the clerk and departed.
There was a faint hope, then, that Frank might yet be alive. On his way to Quebec he decided what to do. As soon as he arrived he inserted an advertisement in the chief papers to the following effect: