“Who! Why, Colonel Conrad, of course.”
“Colonel Conrad killed! When? Where?”
“Oh, but now this is going too far. Do you honestly mean to say that you’re not the man who had a tussle with me, right under the window of his room, where he sat dead?”
“I mean to say that I never saw you until you attacked me in Dalton, and that all your allusions since the attack have been mysterious. This I will declare on my oath, if necessary.”
“Well, you don’t look nor act as if you were lying, and so I’ll go over the whole ground. Between twelve and one o’clock this morning Colonel Conrad was murdered——”
“This is terrible! Who did it?”
“That’s neither here not there,” said Snags, uneasily. “The matter will be looked into, doubtless, and somebody will swing for it. But just listen a moment. When the blow was struck he was holding in his hand a paper which he had just written. That paper was taken from him, but he held one corner so tight that a piece was torn off and left in his grip. The party that did the deed speedily foundout that the paper was good for nothing without the piece that was torn off, for there was a word, or some words, on it that must have furnished a very valuable piece of information. While he was hiding in the bushes near the house, another man came along, and peeped into the room where the dead man sat. He took from his hand the missing fragment of paper, and read it. Then he put it in his pocket, and was going off with it, when the first party stopped him and demanded of him to give it up. He refused, and then they clinched and had a rough-and-tumble fight of it. The second man was quick and wiry, and got away. He ran like the wind, jumped into the buggy by the road-side, and drove off like mad, the first man after him on horseback. But I—that is, he missed him, some way, and on arriving in the village, captured, as it seems, the wrong man.”
“Ah,” exclaimed Leonard, “I am the man who was captured, and you—you are the one who murdered my uncle!”
“Your uncle! So he is your uncle, then. The other one said he was his uncle!”
“True—it must have been Carlos. We are cousins. Colonel Conrad is our uncle.”