"I saw him several times," said Joe.
"What was he like?"
"He was tall, powerfully but slenderly built, with red hair, a long, red, dissipated face, and a short, sandy mustache."
Judge North brought his hand down upon his knee with a sounding blow.
"A red Carroll!" he ejaculated. Then turning to Nina, who stood with blanched face and parted lips beside him, he led her with gentle, old-fashioned courtesy to a chair.
"Sit down, child," he said, "I have a strange story to tell, that touches you nearly."
The family had all gathered about him now, anxious to hear the solution of the mystery that had baffled them so long.
"I know who 'Red Snake' was," he began; "his name was Bernard Carroll. He was a brother of the Lee Carroll whom you buried on the prairies."
"A brother?" cried out Joe; "why, it was he that killed him!"
"I don't doubt it at all. He was a bad man; a degenerate, a scoundrel, from his very boyhood. The two brothers were descendants of a splendid old family, the Carrolls, of Virginia. But every few generations there appears in that family a red Carroll. The family are all of dark complexion, and whenever a red-haired Carroll appears among them there is sure to follow trouble and disaster. Before he was twenty years old Bernard Carroll had broken his mother's heart and caused her death. When he was twenty-three he fell wildly, madly, passionately in love with my sister Marion."