him; exactly how he died, no one knew. Lucas Cullen—you have just heard—wondered all his life; Laylor could not tell then; perhaps he could not now. But he was killed in that fire—murdered.
"For Lucas Cullen had that fire set; he met near Galilee a man in his pay—a sawyer named Quinlan—and sent him to light shavings upwind from Laylor's mill. Probably not with intention of killing Laylor; just to burn him out. But when it was known that Laylor was killed, and that a man had been seen setting a torch to the timber, Lucas Cullen moved quickly to save himself; he said that the man who had set the fire was the Mormon Drane who wanted to kill Laylor to get his wife. It was a savage, lustful lie of the sort which excited men like to believe; they went to get the Mormon and lynch him; then Lucas Cullen—partly to save Drane from being murdered, let us think, but partly also to stop suspicion swinging to his guilty self—made a great play for justice and for a trial for the Mormon and stopped the lynching—and perjured Richard Drane into the cell where he died—my father—for a crime which Lucas Cullen and his man Quinlan had done.
"Is it not so, Lucas Cullen? Stand up and deny it, if not so! Stand before these people or sit there and speak and say to the soul of Henry Laylor, who stands before you, that you had no hand in his murder! Say to the spirit of Richard Drane, there before you with the Book of Mormon, that for his own crime—not yours—you sent him to die in prison! Say to the soul of your own servant, James Quinlan—J. Q. with his ever flaming torch—that, when at last he threatened to turn against you and confess his crime, for the sake of going into the next world clean—say
