road. But not a sound or movement in the sleeping house beyond.

The stars at last paled slowly, the horizon lines came back,--a thin
streak of opal fire. A solitary bird twittered in the bush beside the
spring. Then the back door of the house opened, and the constable came
forth, half-awakened and apologetic, and with the bewildered haste of a
belated man. His eyes were level, looking for his missing leader as he
went on, until at last he stumbled and fell over the now cold and rigid
body. He scrambled to his feet again, cast a hurried glance around
him,--at the half-opened door of the barn, at the floor littered with
trampled hay. In one corner lay the ragged blouse and trousers of the
fugitive, which the constable instantly recognized. He went back to the
house, and reappeared in a few moments with Ira, white, stupefied, and
hopelessly bewildered; clear only in his statement that his wife had
just fainted at the news of the catastrophe, and was equally helpless in
her own room. The constable--a man of narrow ideas but quick action--saw
it all. The mystery was plain without further evidence. The deputy had
been awakened by the prowling of the fugitive around the house in search
of a horse. Sallying out, they had met, and Ira's gun, which stood in
the kitchen, and which the deputy had seized, had been wrested from him
and used with fatal effect at arm's length, and the now double assassin
had escaped on the sheriff's horse, which was missing. Turning the body
over to the trembling Ira, he saddled his horse and galloped to Lowville
for assistance.

These facts were fully established at the hurried inquest which met that
day. There was no need to go behind the evidence of the constable, the
only companion of the murdered man and first discoverer of the body. The
fact that he, on the ground floor, had slept through the struggle and
the report, made the obliviousness of the couple in the room above
a rational sequence. The dazed Ira was set aside, after half a dozen
contemptuous questions; the chivalry of a Californian jury excused the
attendance of a frightened and hysterical woman confined to her room.
By noon they had departed with the body, and the long afternoon shadows
settled over the lonely plain and silent house. At nightfall Ira
appeared at the door, and stood for some moments scanning the plain; he
was seen later by two packers, who had glanced furtively at the scene
of the late tragedy, sitting outside his do