I aims ter last long enough ter stand up with ye first."

CHAPTER XV

Kinnard Towers had spent that evening in his house at the distance of a
furlong from the stockaded structure wherein the drama of his
authorship was to be staged and acted. The cast, from principals to
supernumeraries, having been adequately rehearsed in lines and
business, his own presence on the scene would be not only unnecessary
but distinctly ill advised, and like a shrinkingly modest playwright,
he remained invisible. The plot was forcible in its direct simplicity.
A chance disturbance would spring out of some slight pretext--and
Henderson, the troublesome apostle of innovation, would fall, its
accidental and single victim. When death sealed his lips the only
version of the affair to reach alien ears would be that dictated by
Towers himself: the narrative of a regrettable brawl in a rough saloon.
Against miscarriage, the arrangements seemed airtight, and there was
need that it should be so for, desirable as was the elimination of
Jerry's activities, that object would not have warranted recklessly
fanning into active eruption the dormant crater of Stacy animosities.
However, with Lone Stacy in duress and Turner Stacy in hiding beyond
the state border, the hereditary foes were left leaderless--and would
hardly rise in open warfare. Moreover, Kinnard meant to insure himself
against contingencies by hastening to such prominent Stacys as might be
in communication with the absentees and avowing, with deep show of
conviction that, of all the turbulent affairs which had ever come to
focus in his tavern, nothing had so outraged him as this particular
calamity. He would appear eager for active participation in hunting
down and punishing the malefactors.

Of course, a scape-goat might be required, perhaps more than one, but
there were men who could be well enough sacrificed to such a diplomatic
necessity.

So during the first part of that evening, Kinnard sat comfortably by
his hearth, smoking his pipe with contemplative serenity the while he
waited for the rattle of firearms, which should announce the climax of
the drama. He allowed to drop on his knees the sheaf of correspondence
which had come to his hand through the courtesy of his nephew in the
legislature. These papers bore the caption: C. and S. E. Railways
Company: "_In Re_--Cedar Mountain extension," and they contained meaty
information culled from underground and confidential sources