If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would, unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated for easy martyrdom, and I might have saved her life at least, and in doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching, I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized, for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet. Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyond a question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected. In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me, as I shall proceed to state. VII. SUSPECTED.