“Rubbish, Aunt Julie Ann; you’ve been having a nightmare.”
“I see it all, des ez plain ez I sees you now—I warns ye!”
“I’ll risk it,” John laughed. “I’m hoping for good news to-morrow—please say your prayers for me to-night.”
Yet in spite of his culture and the inheritance of centuries of knowledge, the voodoo message of his old nurse shrouded his spirit in deeper gloom. He walked home with a new sense of dread in his heart, wondering what answer she would send him to-morrow.
CHAPTER XII—THE TRAP IS SPRUNG
THE following morning when Stella, sitting up in bed, opened her mail and read Ackerman’s report, the last doubt of John Graham’s guilt was shattered.
“I have just learned,” Ackerman wrote, “that a number of men of notoriously desperate character from the foot of the mountains were in Independence on the day before the tragedy and that a man by the name of Dan Wiley, their leader, reported in person to John Graham’s office.”
Stella sprang from her bed and began hurriedly to dress.