“Floyd-Rosney,” Randal muttered through his set teeth. “And where did he go?” “Ter de ole _Cher’kee Rose_, sah,” the negro pointed at the derelict, lying on the bar, visible amidst the shadows thronging the river in the ghostly gleams of the moon that was wont to patrol the deck, and seek out the dark recesses of the cabin where the rise and subsidence of the water registered its fluctuations, and to look through the windows of the pilot-house where the steersman at the wheel once took his bearings. It was a stupendous moment in a man’s life when Randal Ducie stood in the shattered old pilot-house and looked down into his own dead face, as it were, ghastly pale and silent, under the moon’s desolate light. The tie between the brothers had been more than the love of women, and the heart of the whole countryside bled for Randal’s grief. The extraordinary resemblance of the two, their fraternal devotion, their exile from the home of their fathers, and its wrongful detention in the possession of others, the destruction of the property by the caving bank, the greatest disaster the country had known for a half century, when its restoration to its rightful heirs seemed imminent, all appealed with tender commiseration to the heart of the world, albeit not easily touched, and a flood of condolence poured in unregarded upon Randal where he sat in his solitary home with bowed head and bated pulses, scarcely living himself, admitting no business, seeing no friend, opening no letter. The knife that Floyd-Rosney had left piercing the dead man’s throat had fixed the crime upon him, together with the testimony at the inquest of the old negro boatman, who had seen him take his way to the derelict, and that of the skipper who had watched him through the binocle of the _Aglaia_ descend the steps, unloose both the boats that swung on the tide, secured to a post, and set one adrift while he rowed the other, the appurtenance of the _Aglaia_. It was well, Randal felt, taking in these proceedings the only interest he could scourge his mind to entertain, that he was not called upon to prosecute on circumstantial evidence some forlorn water rat, or some friendless negro for the millionaire’s crime, as doubtless Floyd-Rosney had contemplated. Though the death of the gentle and genial Adrian went unavenged, save by the heavy hand of Heaven itself, it wrought no calamity to others, except in his incomparable loss. CHAPTER XXVI