desire for vengeance. The gaunt horse
had moved off a few paces, and stood like an apparition, gazing with
spectral indifference at the scene.

Rankin raised his arm and brought the whiplash whistling down upon the
broad shoulders. There was a strange guttural sound, and the figure
before him seemed to collapse and sink, a dead weight, down into the
encircling rope. Rankin's arm was arrested in mid-air.

"Stand up, you hound, or I'll murder you!" he hissed between his teeth.

But the figure hung there like a log. The spectral horse sniffed
strangely.

A swift horror seized upon Rankin. He grasped the heavy shoulder and
shook it roughly. It was like shaking--hush! he dared not think what!

Rankin flung his whip to the ground, and wildly, feverishly, untied the
rope. It was a difficult thing to do, the sinking of the body having
tightened the knots. At last they yielded, and the dead weight tumbled
in a heap before him. Even in his wild horror Rankin thought how the
woman had fallen just so in a heap on the ground a few minutes before.
The thought put life into his heart.

The gaunt horse had taken a step forward and was sniffing at that heap
on the ground, mouthing the limp trousers: a few wisps of hay had clung
to them. Rankin watched the weird scene. He knew that that was a dead
man before him; nothing could make that surer.

He tried to lift the body and carry it toward the house; he could not do
it. It was not the weight, it was the repulsion that lamed him.

He stalked to the cabin and flung open the door. The woman crouched in a
corner with her six children about her; seven pitiful scared faces were
lifted to his. He stepped in and closed the door behind him.

"Dennis Rumpety is dead," he stated, in a hard, unnatural voice. It
seemed to him as if those awful words must echo round the globe, rousing
all the powers of the land against him, striking terror to the hearts at
home.

The woman glanced about her with wandering eyes. Then she shook her
head.

"Dinnis Rumpety? Sure he'll niver be dead!"

"I tell you Dennis Rumpety is dead. I have killed him!"

"You!" she shrieked. "The saints preserve ye!"

It was a ghastly work to get that dishonored body across the corral
while the spectral horse came sniffing after. Rankin wondered whether
the dishonored soul could be far away. He wondered that the woman and
children did not seem to dread being left alone with--_it_. He did not
know how futile ghostly ho