isiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he
sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot
nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the
delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without
form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a
hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was
utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving
eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall
placidly munching provender, and with that, _bang_! inspiration hit him
spang between the eyes.

To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate
in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to
be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent
in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus.
Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition,
her color--white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank--all
these admirably had fitted her for the ring. When, long years before,
Hooper's wagon-shows came to grief in our town Mittie May had been
seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.

Through her sobering maturer years she had passed from one set of hands
to another, until finally, in her declining days, she found asylum in
the affectionate ownership of Judge Priest, with Jeff to curry her fat
sides and no more arduous labor to perform than occasionally to draw the
Judge about from place to place in his ancient shovel-topped buggy.
About her now there was naught to suggest the prancing rozin-back she
once had been; the very look of her eye conjured up images of simple
pastoral scenes--green meadows and purling brooks.

But let a certain signal be sounded and on top of that let a certain air
be played and Mittie May, instantly losing that air she had of a
venerable and dignified sheep, became a Mittie May transformed; a Mittie
May reverted to another and more feverish time; a Mittie May stirred by
olden memories to nightmarish performances. By chance once Jeff had
happened upon her secret, and now, all in one illuminating flash,
recalling the conditions governing this discovery, he gave vent to a low
anticipatory chuckle. It was the first chuckle he had uttered in a
fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his
idea now. He