h now. Don't talk to me. Go on with your flea-skinning,
and let me alone. I know what I'm about!"

"You don't, for you are too befuddled with liquor to know," retorted the
calm old man. "I can remind you of a thing that maybe you ought to
recall. There was a white man lynched for a certain offence two months
ago. It was done by a mob of eight or ten young devils on a drunken
rampage. The authorities was disposed to drop it, because it was
believed the man was guilty, but now it is leaking out that he was the
wrong party. His friends are working as quiet as moles under ground.
They are getting names and stacks of evidence. A man I've done a favor
for come and told me to warn you. I didn't think it was worth while, but
I do now, because if you fire on Alf Henley from the dark you'll be
arrested, and both charges will be saddled on you."

"I don't care a damn about that, either," Bradley spouted, and he turned
toward the house. "I'll do one thing at a time, and take the biggest
first."

"That's your determination, then?"

"You bet it is. I know my business, and I don't want you to put your
fingers in it."

"Well, go ahead with your rat-killing," the money-lender said. "I've
given you a piece of sound advice, and, if you don't take it, that isn't
my lookout."

Bradley strode heavily and with dragging feet along the gravelled walk
to the house. He lunged awkwardly across the veranda floor and went into
the wide hallway and ascended the walnut stairs to his room.

An hour later he came down. He had been drinking again from a supply of
liquor kept in his chamber. One of his hip-pockets bulged with a flask,
the other with a long revolver. No one was on the front veranda or on
the lawn. A dim light from a window at the right of the hall told him
that his uncle was in his room, perhaps absorbed over his accounts and
papers. Passing out at the gate, he took the narrow, private road
through his uncle's fields to Chester, the lights of which danced before
his unsteady vision. It was Saturday, and, as Henley often went to the
store on that night, Bradley concluded that he might be there now. When
he reached the square he found few persons on any of the divergent
streets. A few strangers and drummers sat smoking and chatting on the
low veranda of the little hotel, and in the darkness he passed them
without attracting attention. Reaching Henley's store, he glanced in at
the front. Cahews and Pomp were putting the tumbled dry-go