de pregnant with interest by the story that two bodies
instead of one would be laid to rest. The question of how Bear Cat
Stacy had come to his death would be answered over his open grave, and
men would know at the falling of the last clod whether they should
return quietly to their homes or prepare for the sterner task of
reprisal.

Kinnard Towers must know, too, what happened there, and must know it
speedily, though to go himself or to send one of his recognized
lieutenants was beyond the question. Yet his plans were carefully laid.
Those few nondescripts who bore the repute of being Stacy sympathizers,
while in fact they were Towers informers, were to be present; and along
the miles of "slavish roughs" between Quarterhouse and burial-ground,
like runners in a relay race, were other heralds. When the news began
to come from the place it would travel fast. Sitting grimly behind the
closed stockade of the Quarterhouse and surrounded now not only by a
body-guard but by some scores of fighting men, the old intriguer
anxiously awaited the outcome.

Long before the hour for the services had arrived men, as drab and
neutral in color as the sodden skies, and women wrapped in shawls of
red and blue, began to gather from hither and yon over roads mired to
the prohibition even of "jolt-wagons." They came on foot or on muddied
mules and horses with briar-tangled manes and tails--and having
arrived, they waited, shuffling their weary feet against frost-bite and
eddying in restless currents.

Two men were still at work with shovels and they had spread out their
excavation so wide, in removing slabs of unbreakable rock, that the
place might have been a single, double or even a triple grave.

The wind moaned as murky clouds began to spit snow, and then on the
gulch-washed road which climbed steeply, a little procession was
glimpsed in the distance.

The men fondled their guns, but the cortege was lost again to view
behind a screen of cedars and until it turned finally on the level of
the graveyard itself, its details remained invested with the suspense
of expectancy.

At the fore, when it arrived, was Brother Fulkerson astride his old
mare, and on a pillion behind him rode the "Widder Henderson," the
whiteness of her thin face startlingly accentuated by the unrelieved
lines of her black calico gown. Under her erstwhile vivid eyes lay dark
rings of suffering, but she held her head rigid and gazed straight
before her.

The co