"Miss Barb'ra wish me t' say she done come heah on business, and she like fo' to see yo' all right away. She done bring huh seddle, and war a-gwine ridin' twell you come back. She's a-gittin' ready, and I'll go tell huh you done come. She got a heap o' trubble, thet young missis, so she hev," and the black woman's pursed lips seemed to imply that Professor Griswold was in some measure responsible for Miss Osborne's difficulties.
As he stared out into the street a negro brought a horse bearing a better saddle than Mingo County had ever boasted, and hitched it near the horse he had secured for himself. An instant later he heard a quick step above, and Miss Osborne, sedately followed by the black woman, came down-stairs. She smiled and greeted him cordially, but there was trouble in her brown eyes.
"I didn't warn you of my coming. I didn't want to be a nuisance to you; but there's a new—a most unaccountable perplexity. It doesn't seem right to burden you with it—you have already been so kind about helping me; but I dare not turn to our oldest friends—I have been afraid to trust father's friends at all since Mr. Bosworth acted so traitorously."
"My time is entirely at your service, Miss Osborne; but I have a shameful report to make of myself. I must tell you how miserably I have failed, before you trust me any further. We—that is to say, the prosecuting attorney of this county and a party he got together of Appleweight's enemies—caught the outlaw last night—took him with the greatest ease—but he got away from us! It was all my fault, and I'm deeply disgusted with myself!"
He described the capture and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of Appleweight, and confessed the obvious necessity for great caution in further attempts to take the outlaw, now that he was on guard. Barbara laughed reassuringly at the end of the story.
"Those men must have felt funny when they went back to get the prisoner and found that he had gone up into the air. But there's a new feature of the case that's more serious than the loss of this man—" and the trouble again possessed her eyes.
"Well, it's better not to have our problems too simple. Any lawyer can win an easy case—though I seem to have lost my first one for you," he added penitently.
She made no reply, but drew from her purse a cutting from a newspaper and handed it to him.
"That's from last night's Columbia Vidette, which is very hostile to my father."
He was already running over the heavily leaded column that set forth without equivocation the fact that Governor Osborne had not been in Columbia since he went to New Orleans. It scouted the story that he was abroad in the state on official business connected with the Appleweight case—the yarn which Griswold had forced upon the friendly reporter at the telegraph office in Columbia. The governor of a state, the Vidette went on to elaborate, could not vanish without leaving some trace of himself, and a Vidette representative had traced the steps of Governor Osborne from New Orleans until—the italics are the Vidette's—he had again entered South Carolina under cover of night and for purposes which, for the honor of the state, the Vidette hesitated to disclose.