seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of
that community believed the verdict of the coroner's jury to be just.

This refusal of Joe's to talk out and explain everything was a display
of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which
they had not seen since old Peter's death. But it looked more like
bull-headedness to them.

"Don't the darned fool know he's pokin' his head under the gallus?" they
asked.

What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin' there
in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that
there money come from, gentlemen? That's what I want you to tell _me_!

Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to
group, and which nobody could answer, as they stood discussing it after
Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving
them the weight of his experience.

"That Newbolt's deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen," he
said, shaking his serious whiskers. "There's a lot more behind this case
than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was
planned away ahead. It's been a long time since I've seen anybody on the
witness-stand as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt boy. He knew just what
to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we'll fetch it out of
him--or somebody else."

As men went home to take up their neglected tasks, they talked it all
over. They wondered what Joe would have done with that money if he had
succeeded in getting away with it; whether he would have made it out of
the country, or whether the invincible Bill Frost, keen on his scent as
a fox-hound, would have pursued him and brought him back.

They wondered how high they built the gallows to hang a man, and
discussed the probability of the event being public. They speculated on
the manner in which Joe would go to his death, whether boldly, with his
head up that way, or cringing and afraid, his proud heart and spirit
broken, and whether he would confess at the end or carry his secret with
him to the grave. Then they branched off into discussions of the pain of
hanging, and wondered whether it was a "more horribler" death than
drowning or burning in a haystack, or from eating pounded glass.

It was a great, moving, awakening sensation in the countryside, that
taking off of Isom Chase by a mysterious midnight shot. It pulled people
up out of the drowse of a generation, and set