n is harder
than I can bear.'"

The Colonel's deliberate voice stopped. There was a silence in the
room, and the air seemed stifling. The click of the billiard balls came
distinctly through the partition from the other room. Then there was
another click, a stamp on the floor, and a voice crying coarsely: "Curse
it all--missed again!"

To the stranger's astonishment, the Colonel was on his feet in an
instant, gasping with inarticulate rage. Flinging the door open, he
confronted the startled bar-keeper empurpled and stertorous.

"Blank it all, sir, do you call this a saloon for gentlemen, or a corral
for swearing cattle? Or do you mean to say that the conversation of two
gentlemen upon delicate professional--and--er--domestic affairs--is
to be broken upon by the blank profanity of low-bred hounds over their
picayune gambling! Take them my kyard, sir," choked the Colonel, who was
always Southern and dialectic in his excited as in his softest moments,
"and tell them that Colonel Starbottle will nevah dyarken these doahs
again."

Before the astonished bar-keeper could reply, the Colonel had dashed
back into the room, clapped his hat on his head, and seized his book,
letters, and cane. "Mr. Corbin," he said with gasping dignity, "I will
take these papahs, and consult them again in my own office--where, if
you will do me the honor, sir, to call at ten o'clock to-morrow, I
will give you my opinion." He strode out of the saloon beside the half
awe-stricken, half-amused, yet all discreetly silent loungers, followed
by his wondering but gloomy client. At the door they parted,--the
Colonel tiptoeing towards his office as if dancing with rage, the
stranger darkly plodding through the stifling dust in the opposite
direction, with what might have been a faint suggestion to his
counselor, that the paths of the homicide did not lie beside the still
cool waters.

CHAPTER II.

The house of Captain Masterton Dows, at Pineville, Kentucky, was a fine
specimen of Southern classical architecture, being an exact copy of
Major Fauquier's house in Virginia, which was in turn only a slight
variation from a well-known statesman's historical villa in Alabama,
that everybody knew was designed from a famous Greek temple on the
Piraeus. Not but that it shared this resemblance with the County Court
House and the Odd Fellows' Hall, but the addition of training jessamine
and Cherokee rose to the columns of the portico, and over the colonnade