"Good Lord, he can see in the dark!
Strike a light, some one," Terry said huskily.
The sheriff struck a match.
We lit our candles with trembling hands and pressed forward (in a body) to the spot where the eyes had appeared.
Crouched in a corner of a little recess half way up the irregular wall, we found Mose, shivering with fear and looking down at us with dumb, animal eyes.
We had to drag him out by main force.
The poor fellow was nearly famished and so weak he could scarcely stand.
What little sense he had ever possessed seemed to have left him, and he jabbered in a tongue that was scarcely English.
We bolstered him up with a few drops of whisky from Mattison's flask, and half carried him out into the light.
The guide ran ahead to get a carriage, spreading the news as he ran, that Cat-Eye Mose had been found.
Half the town of Luray came out to the cave to escort us back, and I think the feeling of regret was general, in that there had not been time enough to collect a brass band.
CHAPTER XXIII MOSE TELLS HIS STORY
We took Mose back to the hotel, shut out the crowd, and gave him something to eat.
He was quite out of his head and it was only by dint of the most patient questioning that we finally got his story.
It was, in substance, as Terry had sketched it in the cave.
In obedience to my request, Mose had gone back after the coat, not knowing that the Colonel was before him.
Suddenly, as he came near the pool he heard a scream and looked up in time to see a big negro—the one my uncle had struck with his crop—spring upon the Colonel with the cry,
"It's my tu'n, now, Cunnel Gaylord.
You whup me, an' I'll let you see what it feels like."
The Colonel turned and clinched with his assailant, and in the struggle the light was dropped.
Mose, with a cry, ran forward to his master's assistance, but when the negro saw him climbing up the bank he suddenly screamed, and hurling the old man from him, turned and fled.
"The fellow must have taken him for the devil when he saw those eyes, and I don't wonder!" Terry interpolated at this point.
After the Colonel's murder, it seems that Mose, crazed by grief and fear, had watched us carry the body away, and then had stayed by the spot where his master had died.
This accounted for the marks on the border of the pool.
Knowing all of the intricate passages and hiding places as he did, it had been an easy matter for him to evade the party that had searched for his body.
He ate the food the murderer had left, but this being exhausted, he would, I haven't a doubt, have died there himself with the unreasoning faithfulness of a dog.
When he finished his rambling and in some places scarcely intelligible account, we sat for a moment with our eyes upon his face, fascinated by his look.
Every bit of repugnance I had ever felt toward him had vanished, and there was left in its place only a sense of pity.
Mose's cheeks were hollow, his features sharper than ever, and his face was almost pale.
From underneath his straight, black, matted hair his eyes glittered feverishly, and their expression of uncomprehending anguish was pitiful to see.
He seemed like a dumb animal that has come into contact with death for the first time and asks the reason.
Terry took his eyes from Mose's face and looked down at the table with a set jaw.
I do not think that he was deriving as much pleasure from the sight as he had expected.
We all of us experienced a feeling of relief when the doctor appeared at the door.
We turned Mose over to him with instructions to do what he could for the poor fellow and to take him back to Four-Pools.
As the door shut behind them, the sheriff said (with a sigh, I thought),
"This business proves one thing: it's never safe to lynch a man until you are sure of the facts."
"It proves another thing," said Terry, dryly, "which is a thing you people don't seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us.
Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life."
We pondered this in silence for a moment, then the sheriff voiced a feeling which, to a slight extent, had been lurking in the background of my own consciousness, in spite of my relief at the denouement.
"It's kind of disappointing when you've got your mind worked up to something big, to find in the end that there was nothing but a chance nigger at the bottom of all that mystery.
Seems sort of a let-down."
Terry eyed him with an air of grim humor, then he leaned across the table and spoke with a ring of conviction that carried his message home.
"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel Gaylord was not a chance nigger.
There was no chance about it.
Colonel Gaylord killed himself.
He committed suicide—as truly as if he had blown out his brains with a gun.
He did it with his uncontrollable temper.
The man was an egoist.
He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as of supreme importance.