A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 | Page 6

out--a
squalid, miserable object, with bleared eyes and red disfigured face, a
drunken, half-imbecile Indian.
He was so overcome, indeed, with the heavy sleep of intoxication that
even when they made him stand up, he seemed neither to see anything
nor to hear the questions of the men who knew him and called him by
his name. But there were answers to their questions in another shape
than that of words. The hatchet that lay beside him and the stains of
blood still wet upon his ragged clothing were conclusive evidence.
They led him away, after the little procession which had gone on with
the dray and its load, but he neither resisted, nor indeed spoke at all. He
seemed not to understand what was going on; and the men about him
were for the moment too full of horror, and of that awe which belongs
to the sight of death, to be much disposed to question him.
So they took murderer and victim both to the sawmill, and there waited,
dreading to carry their ghastly load into the town till such warning as
was possible had been given.
Meantime Harry Scott, with his mind full of his mission, drove towards
Cacouna. He saw nothing of the people he passed, or who passed him;
he saw only the sight he had just left, except when there rushed into his
recollection for a moment the wedding-day scarcely six weeks ago, and
the certainty of happiness which then seemed to wait both bride and
bridegroom. And now? "Poor Bella!" broke from his lips, and he
shuddered as he fancied, not Bella, but his cousin Magdalen crushed
down in her youth by such a blow as this. But the momentary, fanciful
connection of the two girls, did but make him the more tender of the
young widow. "Widow!" he said the word half aloud, it seemed so
unnatural, so incredible. But while he thought, he was drawing very
near his destination; for he had at once decided that the proper thing to
do was to find Mr. Bellairs, and leave him to carry the news as he
might think best to his sister-in-law. At the door of the lawyer's office,
therefore, the reluctant messenger stopped, and went in with his face

still full of the strange excitement and trouble of his mission.
A few words can tell the happiest or the saddest news life ever brings
us; all that Harry knew could be told in two sentences, and, half
announced as they were by his looks, Mr. Bellairs instantly understood
the message, and why it was brought to him. He took his hat, and
before Harry was quite sure whether he had made him understand what
had really happened, he was halfway to his own house.
An hour later, the dray, now more carefully arranged and covered,
brought its load to the door of the house which had been so lately
prepared for the bride's coming home. For convenience' sake they
carried the body into a lower room, and laid it there until its burial,
while Bella sat in her chamber above, silent and tearless, not
understanding yet what had befallen her, but through her stunned and
dreary stupor listening from habit for the footsteps which should have
returned at that hour--the footsteps which death had already silenced
for ever.
CHAPTER III.
It is easy to imagine how, in so small a community as Cacouna, the
news of a frightful crime committed in their very midst, would spread
from mouth to mouth. How groups of listeners would gather in the
streets, round every man who had anything of the story to tell. How the
country people who had been in town when the murdered man was
brought home, hurried along the solitary roads with a kind of terror
upon them, and carried the news out to the villages and farms around.
As to the murderer, there was a strange confusion in the minds of many
of the townspeople. Doctor Morton's feud with Clarkson had been so
well known that, if there had been any signs of premeditation or design
about the crime, suspicion would have turned naturally upon him. But
there was no such appearance, nor the smallest reason to suppose that
Clarkson had been within half a mile of the spot that day. On the
contrary, no reasonable doubt could exist that the real murderer was the
Indian who had been found among the bushes. The men who knew him
spoke of him as passionate, brutal, more than half-savage--there was

perfect fitness between his appearance and character, and the barbarous
manner of his crime. And yet while everybody spoke of him as
undoubtedly guilty, almost everybody had a thought of Clarkson
haunting his mind, and an uneasy desire to find out the truth, entirely