When the whites were through with the body, Gus went to the side of the bridge and drew it up. Calling to his aid another Negro, he procured a stretcher and bore the body to Bud Harper's home. CHAPTER XVI. _An Eager Searcher._ Up and down the street on which he lived, Ramon Mansford, the affianced of Alene Daleman, walked as one in a trance. Night was coming and as the shadows deepened the bitterness deepened in his soul. "Think of it! my father sleeps in an unmarked grave somewhere in the South, and I know that the hope of freeing the slave actuated him to enlist in the army. For the Negro, my father buried his sword to the hilt in the blood of his Southern brother and in turn received a thrust, all for a race from which this vile miscreant has crept to murder Alene, my Alene." In the darkness of his own calamity distinctions between right and wrong began to fade away, and he found his hatred of the Negro race assuming a more violent form than that manifested by the native Southerner. In his heart there was the harking back to times more than a thousand years ago--to times when his race was a race of exterminators. At this particular time it seemed to him that nothing would have suited him better than to have taken the lead of forces bent on driving every black face from the land. Now and then he would pause and ask himself: "Is all this horror true? Is the sweet Alene gone? Was the dear one foully murdered while I slept? Great God of heaven, can all this be true? Must I go through life unsupported by the brave heart of Alene on which I was depending for strength to conquer worlds?" He sat down upon the curbstone and buried his face in his hands. About twelve o'clock that night a Negro woman came rushing along at full speed. Ramon seized her and she uttered a loud scream, falling in a helpless heap at his feet. With a tight grip on her arm he said, "Have you, too, blighted somebody's happiness? Have you murdered some one?" With terror stricken eyes the woman looked up into his face and said, "Mistah, please lemme go, please sah!" "What have you done?" sternly asked Ramon. "Nothin' sah," said she. "I'se been roun' ter Dilsy Harper's, settin' up ovah Bud Harper's daid body, whut wuz sent home frum de bridge. Wal, sah, ez shuah ez dis here chile is bawn ter die, while we wuz settin' up ovah Bud's body, Bud hisself walked in. We looked at Bud, den at de body, en we wuz skeert ter death. Den de livin' Bud, went up an looked down on de daid Bud, and de daid Bud skeert de livin' Bud, and de livin' Bud fairly flew outen dat house. Den, bless yer soul, honey, dat ole house wuz soon empty." This weird tale furnished the needed diversion to Ramon's overburdened mind. His thoughts began to run in another direction. "Was the mob mistaken? Is the man thought to have been killed yet alive? If one mistake has been made, who can say that two haven't been made? Is her real murderer yet alive?"