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 trade and had disappeared in the interior some months after his arrival. With Jolie had come Richard Barradell, Gilbert's brother, and Richard had engaged Almayne to assist in the search for Gilbert. All this had happened while Lachlan was in Willtown. Now, after three months spent in following false clues, Richard Barradell, convinced that his brother had perished in the wilderness, had decided to return to London immediately, leaving Almayne to continue the search in Jolie's behalf.

So much Lachlan learned quickly. He learned, too, as the old hunter warmed to his theme, that within the past week Almayne had hit upon a clue to which he was inclined to attach some importance—that an Englishman, agreeing in some respects with the description of Gilbert Barradell, had been seen some eleven months before in the country of Concha, chief of the Appalaches, a friend of the Spaniards of St. Augustine and an enemy of the Charles Town English. Almayne had traced the wanderings of this Englishman to within a day's journey of Concha's town, and there he seemed to have vanished.

Two other facts also Lachlan gathered as the hunter talked, and some instinct told him that these were perhaps the most important facts of all: first, that Jolie's father, Edward Stanwicke of Stanwicke Hall, and Captain Lance Falcon, who was constantly at Stanwicke's side and seemed to have much influence over him, had opposed from the beginning the search for Gilbert Barradell, declaring him undoubt-