In avoiding this issue, his mind began to torment him regarding the evidence against Miss Claxton, which he alone knew, and which he might not have a right to conceal. His ardent belief in her goodness, his firm belief that he had heard Eve die, rested only on intuitive insight, common in men of solitary habit and unscholarly minds; he knew that this was no basis on which to found legal evidence. With these uneasy and unfinished thoughts he at last fell asleep in the faint light of the dawn, and waked again soon with a vivid and bad dream. He dreamed that he was again on the lonely mountain on the night of Eve's death, groping under the stunted thicket of old oak. Again he saw Miss Claxton come to the forked tree. She climbed as before, and reached up one thin arm to deposit something in the highest cleft of the trunk. The moon rose as before; Durgan saw in his dream that the thing she hid there was a knife, and the blade was red. Rousing himself from a sleep that brought so odious a vision, he woke to find the rays of a red sunrise in his face. One of his laborers brought up the borrowed horse which he had arranged to ride to Hilyard. Before he started he went up the trail to the summit house, hoping that Alden might be about. He had nothing definite to ask, and yet he would have been glad to have some parting advice from him. No one was up. The very house was drowsy under the folded petals of its climbing flowers. Durgan went down through the stunted oak wood, and looked up as he passed the forked tree. It was the first time he had been close to it in daylight. In one branch of the fork, close to the notch, there was a round hole, such as squirrels choose for their nests. Better hiding-place for a small object could not be. To act the spy so far as to look into the hole without Miss Claxton's permission would have been what Durgan called "a nigger's trick." Like all the better class of slave-owners, he habitually sought to justify his own assumption of superiority by holding himself high above all mean actions or superstitious ideas. As he went down the hill he was vexed with himself for having been so far influenced by a dream as to have even looked for the hole in the tree. Yet as he rode out into the glorious morning, he found himself arguing that if money for the mulatto had been put in the tree, it was odd that the mulatto had made no effort to get it before his arrest or to send for it after. The thing which had really been put there, if not meant for 'Dolphus, was probably intended to be long hidden. But a dream, of course, meant nothing, and his could easily be accounted for by the tenor of his waking thoughts and the color of the sunrise.