hey are out of it, and they can thank God they are!"

"They are not!" she cried excitedly. "They did it. It was the
White-Caps. We saw them, Helen and I."

The judge got upon his feet with an oath. He had not sworn for years
until that morning. "What's this?" he said sharply.

"I ought to have told you before, but we were so frightened, and--and
you went off in such a rush after Mr. Wiley was here. I never dreamed
everybody wouldn't know it was the Cross-Roads; that they would _think_
of any one else. And I looked for the scarecrow as soon as it was light
and it was 'way off from where we saw them, and wasn't blown down at
all, and Helen saw them in the field besides--saw all of them----"

He interrupted her. "What do you mean? Try to tell me about it quietly,
child." He laid his hand on her shoulder.

She told him breathlessly (while he grew more and more visibly perturbed
and uneasy, biting his cigar to pieces and groaning at intervals) what
she and Helen had seen in the storm. When she finished he took a few
quick turns about the room with his hands thrust deep in his coat
pockets, and then, charging her to repeat the story to no one, left the
house, and, forgetting his fatigue, rapidly crossed the fields to the
point where the bizarre figures of the night had shown themselves to the
two girls at the window.

The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed
to the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the
field, and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast.
Then, returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward
through the next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was
a continuation of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment.
The track, raggedly defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in
a direction which indicated that its terminus might be the switch
where the empty cars had stood last night, waiting for the one-o'clock
freight. Though the fields had been trampled down in many places by
the searching parties, he felt sure of the direction taken by the
Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that the searchers had mistaken the
tracks he followed for those of earlier parties in the hunt. On the
embankment he saw a number of men, walking west and examining the ground
on each side, and a long line of people following them out from town. He
stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-Roads in his hand and he knew it.

H