One by one they came slowly out, looking quite exhausted from their long restraint, the unwonted mental exercitations, and the nervous strain. Then it was developed, to the astonishment and disappointment of the little crowd, tingling with excitement and anxiety, that this document simply set forth the fact that at an inquisition holden on Witch-Face Mountain, Kildeer County, before Jeremiah Flaxman, coroner, upon the body of an unknown man, there lying dead, the jurors whose names were subscribed thereto, upon their oaths, did say that he came to his death from concussion of the brain consequent upon being thrown or dragged from his horse by means or by persons to the jury unknown. There was a palpable dismay on Constant Hite's expressive face. He had hoped that the verdict might be death by accident. Others had expected the implication of horse-thieves, of whose existence the jury being of the neighborhood were well advised, and the disappearance of the man's horse might well suggest this explanation. The coroner would return this inquisition to the criminal court together with a list of the material witnesses. Thus the matter was left as undecided as before the inquest, the jeopardy, the terrors of circumstantial evidence, all still impending, dark with doom, like the black cloud which visibly overshadowed the landscape. IV. Since the knight-errantry of wolf and bear and catamount and fox has scant need of milestones, or signposts, or ferries, or the tender iteration of road-taxes, the casual glance might hardly perceive the necessity of opening a thoroughfare through this wilderness, for these freebooters seemed likely to be its chief beneficiaries. A more rugged district could not be found in all that massive upheaval of rocks and tangled wooded fastnesses stretching from the northeast to the southwest some twenty miles, and known as Witch-Face Mountain; a more scantily populated region than its slopes and adjacent coves scarcely exists in the length and breadth of the State of Tennessee. The physical possibilities were arrayed against the project, so steep was the comblike summit on either side, so heavy and tortuous the outcropping rock that served as the bony structure of the great mountain mass. True, the river pierced it, the denudation of solid sandstone cliffs, a thousand feet in height, betokening the untiring energy of the eroding currents of centuries agone. This agency, however, man might not summon to his aid, being "the act of God," to use the pious language of the express companies to describe certain contingencies for which they very properly decline the responsibility. Against the preemptions of the gigantic forests and the gaunt impassable crags and the abysmal river might be enlisted only such enterprise as was latent in the male inhabitants of the vicinity over eighteen years of age and under fifty, thus subject to the duty of working on the public roads. Nevertheless, the county