ggs and Shifflet to drive them into Maryland for him and
follows on another road."

"But his story, Abner?" said Ward.

"And what of it?" replied my uncle. "He is taken and he must explain how
he comes by the horse that he rides, and the watch that he carries, and
he must find the criminal. Well, he tells you a tale to fit the facts
that you will find when you go back to look, and he gives you Shifflet
and Twiggs to hang."

I never saw a man in more mortal terror than Jacob Bowers. He sat in his
saddle like a man bewildered.

"My God!" he said, and again he repeated it, and again.

And he had cause for that terror on him. My uncle was stern and
ruthless. The pendulum had swung the other way, and the lawless monster
that Bowers had allied was now turning on himself. He saw it and his
joints were unhinged with fear.

A voice crashed out of the ring of desperate men, uttering the changed
opinion.

"By God!" it cried, "we've got the right man now!"

And one caught the rope out of Bowers' hand.

But my Uncle Abner rode in on them.

"Are you sure about that?" he said.

"Sure!" they echoed. "You have shown it yourself, Abner."

"No," replied my uncle, "I have not shown it. I have shown merely
whither circumstantial evidence leads us when we go hotfoot after a
theory. Bowers says that there was a man on the hill above Daniel
Coopman's house, and this man will know that he did not kill Daniel
Coopman and that his story is the truth."

They laughed in my uncle's face.

"Do you believe that there was any such person?"

My uncle seemed to increase in stature, and his voice became big and
dominant.

"I do," he said, "because I am the man!"

They had got their lesson, and we rode out with Shifflet and Twiggs to a
legal trial.

FOOTNOTE:

[C] Reprinted from "Uncle Abner." Copyright, 1918, by D. Appleton and
Company.

[Illustration]

III.--Tad Sheldon, Second-Class Scout[D]

_By John Fleming Wilson_

_A good many Scout stories have been published,
hundreds of them surely, maybe a thousand, or
more, in the last nine years. But the first Scout
story published in the United States was "Tad
Sheldon, Second-Class Scout." It appeared first in
the "Saturday Evening Post." The author has
written a good many stories, Scout and otherwise,
since then, but none better, I think, than this,
and I count it good fortune ind