so foul when we stopped
the drove that we had to tie their mouths up."

"Is that all?" said Abner.

Ward swore a great oath.

"No!" he said. "Do you think we would hang men on that? From what Bowers
told us, we thought Shifflet and Twiggs had killed Daniel Coopman and
driven off his cattle; but we wanted to be certain of it, so we set out
to discover what they had done with Coopman's body after they had killed
him and what they had done with the wagon. We followed the trail of the
drove down to the Valley River. No wagon had crossed, but on the other
side we found that a wagon and a drove of cattle had turned out of the
road and gone along the basin of the river for about a mile through the
woods. And there in a bend of the river we found where these devils had
camped.

"There had been a great fire of logs very near to the river, but none of
the ashes of this fire remained. From a circular space some twelve feet
in diameter the ashes had all been shoveled off, the marks of the shovel
being distinct. In the center of the place where this fire had burned
the ground had been scraped clean, but near the edges there were some
traces of cinders and the ground was blackened. In the river at this
point, just opposite the remains of the fire, was a natural washout or
hole. We made a raft of logs, cut a pole with a fork on the end and
dragged the river. We found most of the wagon iron, all showing the
effect of fire. Then we fastened a tin bucket to a pole and fished the
washout. We brought up cinders, buttons, buckles and pieces of bone."

Ward paused.

"That settled it, and we came back here to swing the devils up."

My uncle had listened very carefully, and now he spoke.

"What did the man pay Twiggs and Shifflet?" said my uncle. "Did they
tell you that when you stopped the drove?"

"Now that," answered Ward, "was another piece of damning evidence. When
we searched the men we found a pocketbook on Shifflet with a hundred and
fifteen dollars and some odd cents. It was Daniel Coopman's pocketbook,
because there was an old tax receipt in it that had slipped down between
the leather and the lining.

"We asked Shifflet where he got it, and he said that the fifteen dollars
and the change was his own money and that the hundred had been paid to
him by the man who had hired them to drive the cattle. He explained his
possession of the pocketbook by saying that this man had the money in
it, and when he went to pay them he sa