nking. When O'Malley turned and strolled
back to the porch, his hands still in his pockets and his eyes still on
the ground as though he were weighing the matter carefully, Starr stood
where he was, apparently unaware that the sheriff had moved. Starr seemed
to be watching the coroner curiously, but he knew just when the sheriff
passed cat-footedly behind him, and he grinned to himself.

The sheriff made one of his sudden moves, and jerked the six-shooter from
its holster at Starr's hip, pulled out the cylinder pin and released the
cylinder with its customary five loaded chambers and an empty one under
the hammer. He tilted the gun, muzzle to him, toward the rising sun and
squinted into its barrel that shone with the care it got, save where
particles of dust had lodged in the bore. He held the gun close under his
red nose and sniffed for the smell of oil that would betray a fresh
cleaning. And Starr watched him interestedly, smiling approval.

"All right, far as you've gone," he said casually, when the sheriff was
replacing the cylinder in the gun. "If you want to go a step farther, I
reckon maybe I can show you where I come down off the bluff when I
heard the shot, and where I went back again after my horse. And you'll
see, maybe, that I couldn't shoot from the bluff and get a man around
on the far side of the house. Won't take but a minute to show yuh." He
gave the slight head tilt and the slight wink of one eye which, the
world over, asks for a secret conference, and started off around the
corner of the house.

The sheriff followed noncommittally but he kept close at Starr's heels as
though he suspected that Starr meant to disappear somehow. So they
reached the bluff, which Starr knew would be out of hearing from the
house so long as they did not speak loudly. He pointed down at the prints
of his boots where he had left the rocks of the steep hillside for the
sand of the level; and he even made a print beside the clearest track to
show the sheriff that he had really come down there as he climbed. But it
was plain that Starr's mind was not on the matter of footprints.

"Keep on looking around here, like you was tracing up my trail," he said
in a low voice, pointing downward. "I've got something I want to tell
yuh, and I want you to listen close and get what I say, because I ain't
apt to repeat it. And I don't want that coroner to get the notion we're
talking anything over. That little play you made with my gun showe