e young man stared. "Why, I am a member of that order myself."

"You! I vould never have had you in my house if I had known it--not if
you vere to pay me a hundred dollar a week."

"What's wrong with the order? It's for charity and good fellowship. The
rules say so."

"Maybe in some places. Not here!"

"What is it here?"

"It's a murder society, that's vat it is."

McMurdo laughed incredulously. "How can you prove that?" he asked.

"Prove it! Are there not fifty murders to prove it? Vat about Milman
and Van Shorst, and the Nicholson family, and old Mr. Hyam, and little
Billy James, and the others? Prove it! Is there a man or a voman in
this valley vat does not know it?"

"See here!" said McMurdo earnestly. "I want you to take back what
you've said, or else make it good. One or the other you must do before
I quit this room. Put yourself in my place. Here am I, a stranger in
the town. I belong to a society that I know only as an innocent one.
You'll find it through the length and breadth of the States, but always
as an innocent one. Now, when I am counting upon joining it here, you
tell me that it is the same as a murder society called the Scowrers. I
guess you owe me either an apology or else an explanation, Mr. Shafter."

"I can but tell you vat the whole vorld knows, mister. The bosses of
the one are the bosses of the other. If you offend the one, it is the
other vat vill strike you. We have proved it too often."

"That's just gossip--I want proof!" said McMurdo.

"If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you
are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you
vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad
enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare
not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes,
indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!"

McMurdo found himself under sentence of banishment both from his
comfortable quarters and from the girl whom he loved. He found her
alone in the sitting-room that same evening, and he poured his troubles
into her ear.

"Sure, your father is after giving me notice," he said. "It's little I
would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it's only
a week that I've known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and
I can't live without you!"

"Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don't speak so!" said the girl. "I have told
you, have I not, tha