Certainly no institution of its type ever had such cheerful inmates as the Glenrose Sanatorium could boast so long as Colonel Kenwynton and the blind Major sojourned within its gates, the guests of the alienist and Captain Hugh Treherne. The patient experienced no recurrence of his malady during the visit. Indeed, the beneficial influence, with the incident change of thought, conversation, and occupation, was so obvious that the physician acceded to Colonel Kenwynton’s earnest urgency to allow the Captain to go home with him and spend a few weeks at his plantation, in a neighboring county. They made a solemn compact for the conservation of his safety and the promotion of his mental health.

“Captain,” said the Colonel the first evening that they spent together over the wood fire in the old plantation house, “I don’t know what is the particular devil that you say possesses you at times, and I don’t want to know. He is an indignity to you and an affront to me. Never mention the nature of the obsession to me for I won’t hear it. Never let me have so much as a glimpse of his horn or his hoof. But if you, unhappily, ever feel again the clutch of his claw fastening on you, just report to me, and we’ll both strike out in a dog-trot for that insane asylum, and let the doctor exorcise him a bit. And I swear to you before God on our sacred bonds as comrades in the Lost Cause I will stay there with you till you are ready to come home with me. Shake hands on it, dear old fellow—shake hands on it.”

Perhaps because the topic was interdicted in conversation it was the less intrusive in thought. Hugh Treherne maintained an observance of the Colonel’s mandate as strict and as soldierly as if it had been read in general orders at the head of the regiment. He found an interest in the Colonel’s affairs in the ramshackle old place, which was but a meager remnant of his former princely domain. Colonel Kenwynton had brought down from the larger methods of the old times a constitutional disregard of minutÆ. Hence men, “indifferent honest,” otherwise would overreach him in negotiation. Servants filched ruthlessly his minor possessions. His pastures, fields, barns, orchards, were plundered with scarcely a realization of the significance of robbery, the facile phrase, “The old Cunnel won’t care,” or “The old Cunnel won’t ever know the difference,” sufficient to numb any faint prick of conscience.

And thus it was that his home had fallen to decay; his barns and fences rotted; his gin was broken and patched and deteriorated in common with all his farm machinery; his hedges of Cherokee rose, widened, unpruned and untended, becoming veritable land grabbers, rather than boundaries, and yearly more and more of his acres must needs be rented for lack of funds to pay a force of laborers. Colonel Kenwynton lived on in his mortgaged home and “scuffled up the money,” as he phrased the process, to meet the interest year by year, and kept but sorry cheer by a bleak and lonely fireside. Nevertheless, he twirled up the ends of his white mustachios jauntily and faced the world with a bold front.

From his own account it seemed wonderful that he had any income at all, and as if much business tact must be requisite to hold his mortgages together in such shape that they should assume all the enlightened functions of a fortune. The age of some of these obligations was a source of special pride with him, although sometimes with an air of important dismay he would compute the amount of interest he had paid in the course of years on their several renewals aggregating more than the property would sell for in the present collapsed condition of such real estate values. When he came to speak of the interest he had promised to pay, he would pause with an imperative shake of the head, as if to abash the futurity which was fast bringing about the maturity of these notes.

“Why, Colonel, this is not good business,—you have practically bought your own property twice over,” Treherne attempted to argue with him one day when his mood waxed confidential. “You should have given up the fight long ago and let them foreclose.”

“Foreclose on my home place, sir,—the remnant of my father’s plantation?” he replied in amaze. “Why, what would the snail do without the shell he was born with? I shall need a narrower one before that day comes, I humbly trust in Providence.”

Colonel Kenwynton could scarcely imagine existence without a mortgage. A deed of trust seemed as natural and essential an incident of a holding in fee simple as the title papers.

Treherne discovered as time went on opportunities for betterment in the Colonel’s affairs, small it is true, pitiful in comparison with the ideals of the old gentleman, who lifted his brows in compassionate surprise when the subject was broached, and, but that he could not contravene the common sense of the proposition, he might have thought it an insane impulse, manifesting itself in schemes of domestic economy on a minute scale.

“Colonel, this place ought to make its own meat. There is plenty of corn in that rearward barn. I put a padlock on its door to-day. Those young shoats will be as fine a lot of meat as ever stepped by hog-killing time. I had them turned into the oak woods to-day,—to give them a chance at the mast,—makes the meat streaked lean and fat, you know.”

“You surprise me,” said the Colonel, looking blankly over his spectacles. “I didn’t know there was any corn left. And a few hogs didn’t seem worth wasting time about. I don’t go into such matters, dear boy,—cotton is my strong suit. Cotton is the only play.”

“You spent your time in the war mostly on the firing line, Colonel. Somebody ought to be mighty thankful you were not in the quartermaster’s office. That ham we cut to-day came from the store, and the cook tells me so does every pound of lard that goes into your frying pan, and all the bacon you furnish to your force of hands. And yet you have here an ample lot of bacon on the hoof and abundance of good feed to fatten it.”

The Colonel appraised the logic and sat humiliated and silent.

“I had the shoats all marked and sent the mark to the county court to be registered. And now you’ll eat your own meat after January or go without,” said Treherne sternly, in command of the situation.

By some accident, searching in the Colonel’s desk for an envelope or some such matter, Treherne chanced to discover a receipt for a bill which the old gentleman had carelessly paid twice.

“I took his word, of course,” said the Colonel in vicarious abasement, “as the word of a gentleman and an old soldier.”

“An old soldier on the back track generally. I remember him well,” said Treherne uncompromisingly. “He shall refund as sure as my name is Treherne.”

And he did refund, protesting that the matter was an accident, an oversight, which excuses the Colonel accepted in good faith and brought back to the skeptical Hugh Treherne.

“So queer those mistakes never happen to your advantage, Colonel,” he snarled, and although his contention was obviously logical, the Colonel listened dubiously.

In truth, Colonel Kenwynton was of a different animus, of a dead day, of a species as extinct as the Plesiosaurus. He could not even adapt himself to the conditions of his survival. He could neither hear nor speak through the telephone, although all his faculties were unimpaired. He held himself immune from diseases of modern diagnosis; for him there was no microbe, no appendicitis, no neurasthenia. His credulity revolted against the practicability of wireless telegraphy and aviation. He clove to his old books, and, except for the newspapers, he read nothing that had been printed within the last fifty years. His ideas of amusement were those of previous generations. He was a skilled sportsman, a dead shot, indeed; his play at billiards held the record at his club; he was versed in many games of chance and had the nerve to back his hand or his opinion to the limit of his power.

He was a shrewd judge of horseflesh, and, as he often remarked since he could no longer own and race a string, he took pleasure in seeing the fine animals of other men achieve credit on the turf. Despite his early gambling and racing proclivities he had always been esteemed a man of immaculate honor and held a high social position. This ascendancy was supplemented by certain associations of special piety incongruously enough. As long as his wife had lived he accompanied her to church every Sunday morning; he drew the line, it is true, at the evening service. He carried a large prayerbook, and his notable personality rendered his presence marked. He read the responses with a devotional air and a solemn voice and listened to the sermon with an appearance of unflagging interest and absorption; as he seemed to take it for granted that he could go to heaven on the footing of an honorary member, his persuasion was in a manner accepted, and it might have been a source of surprise to his friends to realize that, after all, he was not a professedly religious man.

For some weeks the two incongruous companions lived on in great peace and amity in the seclusion of the old plantation house, a rambling frame structure far too large for the shrunken number of its inmates. The broad verandas surrounding it on three sides scarcely knew a footfall; the upper story was unoccupied save for the Colonel’s bedroom, for Treherne had selected a chamber among the vacant apartments on the ground floor that, through a glass door opening on the veranda, permitted his egress betimes to take up his self-arrogated supervisory duties on the place hours before his host, always a late riser, was astir.

One night,—a memorable night,—a dreadful thing happened. The Colonel lay asleep in his big mahogany four-poster; the placidity of venerable age on his face was scarcely less appealing than the innocence of childhood; his snowy hair on the pillow gave back a silvery gleam to the red suffusions from the hearth. If he dreamed, it was of some gentle phase of yore, for his breathing was soft and regular, his consciousness far away adown the misty realms of the past, irrevocable save in these soft and sleeping illusions. The old house was still and silent. At long intervals an errant gust stole around a corner and tried a window. Then it skulked away and, for a time, a mute peace reigned.

Suddenly a sound,—not of the elements, not from without. A sound that in the deep peace of dreams smote no fiber of consciousness. It came again and again. It was the sound of a step ascending the stair. A slender shaft of light preceded it—the dim radiance showed first in a line under the door. Then the door slowly swung ajar, and Hugh Treherne entered, his candle in his hand—not the officer that the old Colonel had known and trusted in the years that tried men’s souls, who never broke faith or failed in a duty; not the piteous wreck whom he had met on the tow-head where the Cherokee Rose lay aground, who wept on his neck and besought his aid; not the earnest altruist, who planned and contrived his escape from durance, through suffering and dread, to retrieve the injustice done to an old comrade’s heirs, and with his first recall of memory to reveal hidden treasure to enrich other men. This was Hugh Treherne, of the obsession, a man who believed himself possessed of the devil.

Colonel Kenwynton, gazing wincingly up with eyes heavy with sleep, and dazed by the glare of the candle held close to his face, hardly recognized the lineaments bent above him—wild, distorted, with a sinister smile, a queer furtive doubt, as if some wicked maniacal impulse debated with the vanishing instinct of reason in his brain.

The Colonel feared no man. The instinct of fear, if ever it had existed in him, was annulled, atrophied. But in this lonely house, in the presence of this strange and inexplicable possession, in all that this change, so curiously wrought, so radical, so sinister, intimated, his blood ran cold.

“He has come, Colonel,” hissed the strange man, for the Colonel could hardly make shift to recognize him, “the Devil has come!”

There was an aghast pause. Then Colonel Kenwynton understood the significance of the catastrophe. He plunged up in the bed, throwing off the cover, and gazed wildly around the room.

“The Devil has come?—Then skirmish to the front, Hugh! Hold him in check, while I get on my clothes, and I’ll flank him. By George, I’ve led a forlorn hope in my time, and I’m not to be intimidated by any little medical fiend like this!”

It was not long, however, that they sojourned at the sanatorium, but the doctor, who had heard of the suddenness of the seizure, warned Colonel Kenwynton that he had always best have help at hand in case of a relapse as sudden.

“You might be in danger of violence from him,” the doctor explained, seeing that Colonel Kenwynton stared in blank amaze.

“In danger of violence, sir, from my own officer,” he exclaimed, flouting the obvious absurdity, as if the Confederate army were in complete organization, the loyal submission to a superior in rank at once the dearest behest and the instinct of second nature with the soldier.

And, indeed, Hugh Treherne justified the trust. He wrought Colonel Kenwynton nothing but good. His mental health was so far restored to its normal strength that when they had returned together to the old home he took the lead in all those practical little affairs of life which bored the Colonel, and which he at once misunderstood and despised. He shrank from society, in which, indeed, he was more feared than welcomed, and the Colonel, in compassion for his infirmity and loneliness, had given up most of his cronies. The Colonel suffered from this deprivation more than Treherne, who took an intense and almost pathetic interest in trifling improvements; the fences were mended; the farm buildings were repaired; various small peculations ceased, for the servants and the hands whose interests brought them about the place were afraid of the “crazy man,” and were alert and capable in obeying his orders,—the anger that flashed in his wild dark eyes was not reassuring. He pottered in placid content about these industrial pursuits till chance led to a greater utility.

He displayed unexpected judgment in advice which saved the Colonel from taking a financial step that would, indeed, have bereft the simple snail of his rickety old shell in his defenseless years, and certain financiers of a dubious sort, baffled in the expectation of gain at the old man’s loss, looked askance at Hugh Treherne and his influence with his former commander which promised in time to remove him altogether from their clutches. They made great talk of having considered his interest rather than their own, and in set phrase withdrew the sun of their favor to shine on his shattered affairs no more. But his affairs were on the mend. Through Treherne’s urgency he devoted the returns from the bulk of his cotton crop, unusually large this year, to the lifting of a mortgage on a pretty tract of land nearer the county town than his plantation, almost in the suburbs, in truth, and which was thus left unencumbered. In this matter he was difficult of persuasion, and yielded only at last to be rid of importunacy.

“Lord, Hugh, how lonesome I do feel without that money,” he said drearily, lighting his candle one night.

“But you have got the land free of all encumbrance, Colonel,—dead to rights,—within two miles of the town, right out there in the night.”

“It is a cold night and dark,” said the Colonel, toying with the snuffers. “It seems cruel to leave it there, bare and bleak, with no sort of a little old mortgage to cover it.”

But then he laughed and took himself upstairs to his rest.

A similar application of funds betided his later shipments of bales, the receipts from which were formerly wont to vanish in driblets he hardly knew how.

“Hugh, this way of paying debts that I thought would last through my time and be discharged by my executors almost takes my breath away,” he said half jocosely, half upbraiding. “You scarcely leave me a dollar for myself,—to buy me a little ‘baccy.’” And then they both laughed.

In the forty years of Hugh Treherne’s incarceration such independent means as he had possessed had barely sufficed for his maintenance at the sanatorium, constantly dwindling until now becoming inadequate for that purpose. His relatives greatly disapproved of the course that events had taken and were also solicitous for his safety while at large and the possibility of injury to others at his hands. One of them, a man of ample fortune, by way of coercing acquiescence in their views, notified Colonel Kenwynton that they would not be responsible for any expenses which Captain Treherne might incur during his absence from the asylum, where he had been placed with the sanction of his kindred, and where the writer of this communication was prepared to defray all the costs of his sojourn and treatment. Colonel Kenwynton, in a letter as formal and courteous as a cartel and as smoothly fierce, expressed his ignorance that any moneys had been asked of Captain Treherne’s relatives, and begged to know when and by whom such requests had been made. Then a significant silence settled on the subject.

The old Colonel felt that he had routed the enemy, but Hugh Treherne, to whom he detailed the circumstances, for he treated his friend in every respect as a sane man and kept nothing from him, did not share his host’s elation. A deep gloom descended upon his spirits and a furtive apprehension looked out of his eyes. He cautiously scanned the personnel of every approach to the house before he ventured to appear and greet the newcomers, and in his small interests about the place he kept within close reach of refuge. The negroes began to notice that he discontinued his supervisory errands to the fields where the picking of cotton was still in progress and where he had shown himself exceedingly suspicious of the accounts of the weigher and the bulk of the cotton delivered as compared with the distribution of the money furnished by Colonel Kenwynton for paying the cotton pickers. “The ole Cunnel’s crap will sho’ly turn out fur all hit is worf’ dis time,” the grinning darkeys were in the habit of commenting.

The old gentleman was constitutionally and by training incapable of detecting this deviation from the established routine, but affection whetted his wits and he observed the change in Hugh Treherne’s appearance when it began to be so marked as scarcely to be imputed to fluctuations in his malady.

“Why are you looking so down-in-the-mouth, Hugh?” he demanded one morning after breakfast as he sprawled comfortably with his pipe before the crackling fire, agreeable in the chill of the early December day despite the bland golden sunshine of the southern winter. Treherne cast at him a glance helplessly terrified, like a child in the face of danger, and said not a word. “You are losing your relish for country life, I am afraid,” the Colonel went on. “Why, you haven’t put your foot in stirrup for a week. Why don’t you take your horse out for a canter?”

The hearty genial tones opened the floodgates of confidence. It was impossible for Treherne to resist the look of affectionate solicitude, of kindly sympathy in those transparently candid eyes.

“Colonel,—I’m—I’m—afraid.”

“Zounds, sir. Afraid of what?”

“Capture,” the hunted creature replied succinctly.

“Why, look here, man,” the Colonel rallied him, “I really think you have been captured before this time. How long were you in prison at Camp Chase?”

“But, Colonel, this is different. I think my friends—my unfriends,—are bent on restoring me to seclusion.”

“Doctor Vailer won’t receive you,—professional pride much lacerated by the criticism of his course expressed by your precious relative, Tom Treherne,—excuse me if I pause here to particularly curse him—and you know when you touch a really learned technician of any sort on his professional pride, you have got hold of his keenest susceptibility, where he feels most acutely and most high-mindedly, the very nerves of his soul, so to speak, his spiritual essence. Doctor Vailer won’t have you.”

“But there are other alienists, other asylums in Mississippi.”

“And under your favor there is me in Mississippi,—and there is the law of the land. I tell you, Hugh, that Tom Treherne might as well try to bottle up the Mississippi River as to incarcerate you again without Doctor Vailer’s sanction, of course, so long as I am out of the ground.”

Hugh Treherne stirred uneasily and crossed and uncrossed his legs as he sat opposite the Colonel in a big mahogany chair before the frowsy hearth where the ashes of nearly all the fires since fall set in were banked behind the big tarnished brass dogs—the Colonel was no dainty housekeeper, and deserved the frequent declaration that “de Cunnel don’t know de diffunce.”

“People generally, Colonel, will approve the course of my relations,” Treherne argued. “It will seem the proper thing as long as I am—am—occasionally—absent.”

“Well, you are all here, now, in one piece,” declared the old man, wagging his head with vehement emphasis.

“It will seem very generous of Tom Treherne to offer, to desire to maintain me at his own expense at a high-priced private sanatorium, since I have no means of my own.”

He paused, a bitter look of repulsion on his face. All these years—these long years, the men of his own age, the compeers of his youth, had been at work restoring their shattered fortunes, after the terrible cataclysm of war that had wrecked the financial interests as well as the face of the southern country, achieving eminence and distinction in their varied lines of effort, life signifying somewhat of attainment even to those of meanest ability, while he was gone to waste, destroyed by his own gallant exploit; the blow of the sabre, the jeering accolade of Fate, when he had triumphantly led his troop to the capture of a strong battery, had consigned him to forty years of idleness, helplessness, imprisonment, in effect. “Be brave, loyal, and fortunate,” quotha.

He was silently revolving these reflections so long that Colonel Kenwynton, puffing his pipe with gusto, declared:

“I’ll make Tom Treherne’s liberality look like thirty cents before I am done with him. He can’t choke you off and hide you out because he is afraid you might be troublesome to him in the future,—dispose of you for good and all,—not while I am alive. Why, damme, man, you commanded a troop in my regiment.”

“If he should once more lay hands on me I could never get away from him and his precautions and anxieties, and considerations for the safety of the public and open-handed generosity. And, Colonel, you might not know where he had stowed me away next time.”

“Hoh,” snorted the Colonel, “I never lose sight of you longer than between breakfast and dinner. I’d be on his track with every detective in the State before dark. Why, Hugh, I’m a moneyed man. I’d take advantage of your absence to mortgage that little tract of land out yonder bare of all encumbrance, and I’d spend the last nickel of it making publicity for Tom Treherne. He isn’t going to spend any money except for his own objects. Now, boots and saddles! Time for you to be on the march!”

In two hours Treherne was back again, with a flush on his face and a light in his eyes, bearing the mail, for which he had ridden to the nearest town, and this contained matters of interest both for him and the Colonel. It was, indeed, a rare occurrence when he received a letter—in forty years he could count the missives on the fingers of one hand. To-day the post brought him one addressed directly to him by Adrian Ducie, although the counsel for the two brothers wrote instead to Colonel Kenwynton. In common with all people of advancing years, Treherne was continually impressed with the superiority of the methods of the past in comparison with those of to-day. He noted the courtesy, the consideration of the tone of the letter, and at once likened it to the manner of the writer’s boy uncle, who had been his chum and comrade in the ancient days. His heart warmed to the perception of tact which had induced this one of the brothers to write who had been present at the finding of the box and the valuable papers, that it was hoped would return to the Ducie heirs the estate which had been so long wrested from them. Adrian and Randal had both taken care on that occasion to express their deep appreciation of the efforts of Archie Ducie’s friend to restore to them their rights, although they had been the victims of his disqualified memory. But now Adrian repeated their realization of the extreme and friendly interest which had caused this object to so persistently cling to the mind and intention of Captain Treherne, and asked if he would object to giving testimony in a sort which the counsel recommended, immediately after the filing of the bill for the recovery of the property, a proceeding de bene esse, to be used in case of death or a recurrence of a malady which would prevent the taking of his deposition in the regular proceedings in the cause.

It was a difficult letter to write, a delicate proposition to make, and it was done with a simple directness, a lack of circumlocution which might imply that Adrian Ducie thought it a usual matter that gentlemen could be seized with a recurrence of acute mania, obstructing the course of business, and tending to impede justice. Treherne declared that it was exactly the sort of letter that Archibald Ducie would have written, and he was eager to comply with the request.

“Only,” he began, and paused abruptly.

“Only what?” asked the Colonel, looking up with grizzled eyebrows drawn.

“You don’t know how—how baffling it is to talk, to speak, when you are aware that everybody is all the time disparaging every word as insanity. Even you could scarcely hold your own under such circumstances.”

“I could,” declared the Colonel hardily. “I’d know that nine out of every ten men are crazy anyhow, with no lucid intervals,—natural fools, born fools—fools for the lack of sense,—only,” with a crafty leer, “the rest of the fellows are so looney themselves that nobody has found it out.”

Treherne laughed, and the Colonel went on with his prelection.

“Never stop to consider what people will think, Hugh. They will think what they damn please. It is the root of most of the troubles that beset this world,—trying to square our preferences and duty to what people will think.”

Thus the testimony de bene esse was taken, Captain Treherne’s story from the beginning;—his part in the concealment of the treasure at Duciehurst, assisting his friend and comrade Archibald Ducie; his knowledge of the nature of the papers among the jewels; the early death of his friend; his own wound and his consequent mental disability; his incarceration for forty years in an insane asylum; his recent recovery of memory, and his resolve to right this wrong which impelled him to make his escape from Glenrose; his meeting with Colonel Kenwynton; the strange attack he sustained from unknown miscreants after quitting the sand-bar; the transit, bound and gagged, to Duciehurst, supplemented by the circumstances of his liberation by Colonel Kenwynton and Adrian Ducie. The affidavit of the alienist as to his lucid condition at the time and his present mental reliability completed the proceedings.

This was merely a precautionary measure, designed to guard against a relapse of Captain Treherne into his malady. The Ducie heirs had already made formal demand for the restoration of their ancestral estate, alleging the full satisfaction of the indebtedness, recording the release of the mortgage and the quit-claim deed, and bringing suit against all in interest.