r investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body."

Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his
neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life.
Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and
with fear.

Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make
him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting
it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet.
The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and
the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other's shoulders and then
backed away.

For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living,
striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old
plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day.
The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which
delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with
gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright
metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those
glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.

Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and
Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all
and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and
there was no doubt that it was his own.

That also was the opinion of the coroner's jury, which walked out from
its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its
verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound,
inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the
accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal.

Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she
gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She
sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up
with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a
firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic breasts. She
stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression
around the room.

"Joe didn't do it, if that's what you mean," said she.

"Madam--" began the coroner severely.

"Yes, you little whiffet," she burst out sharply, "you're the one that
put 'em up to do it! Joe didn't do it, I