The spectacle which met the eyes of the alarmed household when they rushed out was that of two men lying prostrate on the ground, with the pitchfork and pistol near them, and the first impression naturally was that the coachman in an insane moment had turned and attacked his young master. In a minute or two the true state of affairs was made known; the wounded man was borne into the house, and messengers despatched in every direction in search of the murderous assailant. From the first the medical man summoned gave very little hope of Barbour’s recovery, and positively forbade him being questioned in any way. But when the news of the crime had been sent to Edinburgh, and I went out to get the facts of the case, the toll-keeper had spoken to the county constable of all that took place at the door, and, after a visit to that worthy, I thought I had the true solution of the mystery, which was far from being the case. During some of his visits to London the young heir had met the old tramp’s daughter; the usual heart-rending result had followed, and the visit of the father had been undertaken solely for revenge. That was my view of the case, and in spite of the deadly determination with which that vengeance had been wreaked, my sympathy lay more with the poor father than his victim. To my surprise, however, both the toll-keeper and the county police strongly dissented from my opinion. Stephen Barbour, they strenuously declared, was quite incapable of such villainy. His character was singularly pure, and his whole life had been known to these men to be honourable and upright. From the lowest to the highest, every one had a good word for Stephen Barbour, and at the time of the shooting he was about to be married to a gifted young lady, who for years had been sole mistress of his affections. Without troubling to argue the point I set out to trace the murderer. Edinburgh was not a great distance from the scene of the attack, and the nearest large city, and my experience is that a genuine red-handed murderer always seeks safety among the masses of the biggest town within reach, unless he can at once leave the country. This one was poor—his last penny had been expended—therefore he could not go far quickly. I returned to Edinburgh, and the same afternoon met a man at the Night Asylum who had given the old tramp twopence, and a bit of white cotton to bind round his wounded arm. He had come upon him at the roadside near the city trying to remove the ragged coloured handkerchief with which he had bound up the arm, and which he was afraid might poison the wound.