"Remember that you felt the package in the Assessor's coat-pocket after you left Dollan; that you no longer felt it at the smithy, and yet the coat you had buttoned was still fastened. This, to be sure, is no positive proof--nay, the latter circumstance at first even seems to be against my supposition. Why, it might be said, should a thief so cunning in all other respects intentionally incur an additional risk? But people may try to be too cunning; and it certainly was not known that you had kept your eye on the package all the evening, and afterwards, when you buttoned the Assessor's coat, even had it under your hand. The defender of the accused will, of course, doubt the correctness of this statement, will--but we are not in a court of justice. To me the fact is plain: the Assessor had the money with him at the time of the fall; afterwards, when the two Prebrows raised the poor fellow, while Henrich Scheel stood by with the lantern, he no longer had it--that is, it had been stolen during the interval. "By whom? "Undoubtedly by this very Hinrich Scheel, but very, very probably not by him alone. "Can Brandow have been present at the time? "He has taken no little trouble to prove his alibi, even before any proof was asked, and evidently began the affair cunningly enough. He rode here by the way of Neuenhof, Lankenitz, and Faschwitz--that is a fact; the people in the villages heard him dash through; he even took time to talk to several persons he met. If he rode the whole way he cannot have been present at the time the deed was committed; even the best rider on the fastest horse could not do that. But suppose he did not ride the whole way--suppose he turned into the road just above Neuenhof--suppose the spectral horseman whom you saw in your vision dashing across the morass had been a veritable rider of flesh and blood, and this rider had been Carl Brandow. "You say that is impossible. What is impossible to a man pursued by the furies, if he has a horse under him like the much-praised Brownlock? "Brandow rode Brownlock that night; the groom at the Fuerstenhof swore it, after he saw the racer, day before yesterday, on his way to Sundin. And when a man like Brandow rides a horse which in itself represents a small fortune, and on which, moreover, he has bet thousands, on such a night, over such roads, at such a pace, he must have been in a great hurry. "He must have been in a very great hurry, or, my dear friend, you would not have escaped with your life; you certainly would not have been spared. A man whom people dash headlong over a precipice sixty feet high they silence entirely, if they are not in too great a hurry. "Yet, as I said before, this will probably remain a mystery, even to a wiser judge than Justizrath von Zadenig. One of those who were there will never betray it, and the other can no longer do so.