The Land Claim — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

74 THE LAND-CLAIM. and the next morning he had business in another county. Now you may give me your inference.” Flag, whose countenance had undergone a variety of ehanges, was visibly affected. “This is a strange case, Squire,” he said. Ican not help being impressed in the same way you are; and then there is another circumstance might affect the evidence. Ed sold his gun that day—at all events he said so—and he got rid of it, any way. Was he afraid it would betray him, or was he anxious to get rid of it for some other reason? It was a gun he made a great fuss over, and had often said he would not sell it. But it was curious he should have hit upon the very description of thing which we had seen, when he related his “ Well, either he saw the apparition too, the same as we did, or else he learned enough from our remarks to be able to describe it, and took that way to divert suspicion. For if he saw the Doctor point him out, as we did, he must have felt very uneasy, lest we should be impressed by it in a way to injure him. He acted his part exceedingly well, for he must have been in mortal terror. But he did not sell his gun! I looked out for that too, and I found it one day, hidden under a log in the ravine, not far from where the dispute occurred, and in a direction from it to have hit the Doctor, as the sur- geon described, and on lower ground, as he said. _ What more do we want to know about it?” “Not much. But you have not told me yet how you found out he was a horse-thief.” “Only by ‘induction,’ as the philosophers say. 1 chanced to hear of a case where a respectable-looking young man had applied for work at a mill-place down below here a few miles, and, after remaining there at work long enough to get ‘the hang of things,’ had demanded his pay and left. That night the horses, a splendid pair, were stolen, the stable lock having been picked with the mill tools. The owner told me—for I went down to see him, and get a description of the man—that one of his horses could not have been got out of the stable by a stranger, or one who had never handled him, which made it pretty certain who the thief was.” “ And did the mill man describe Ed?” Commicloooks.conn