'The Judge and I were just laying our plans to buy the Pilot Knob, and--" "Colonel, one moment.

Your Honor, we put these letters in evidence." The letters were a portion of the correspondence of Major Lackland with Silas Hawkins; parts of them were missing and important letters were referred to that were not here.

They related, as the reader knows, to Laura's father.

Lackland had come upon the track of a man who was searching for a lost child in a Mississippi steamboat explosion years before.

The man was lame in one leg, and appeared to be flitting from place to place.