want any
one else to kill what I have the best right to kill?"

"Tom," says Doctor Kirby, really puzzled, to judge from his actions, "I
don't understand what makes you say you have the right to take my life."

"Dave, where is my sister buried?" asts Colonel Tom.

"Buried?" says Doctor Kirby. "My God, Tom, is she DEAD?"

"I ask you," says Colonel Tom.

"And I ask you," says Doctor Kirby.

And they looked at each other, both wonderized, and trying to
understand. And it busted on me all at oncet who them two men really
was.

I orter knowed it sooner. When the colonel was first called Colonel Tom
Buckner it struck me I knowed the name, and knowed something about it.
But things which was my own consarns was attracting my attention so hard
I couldn't remember what it was I orter know about that name. Then I
seen him and Doctor Kirby knowed each other when they got that first
square look. That orter of put me on the track, that and a lot of other
things that had happened before. But I didn't piece things together like
I orter done.

It wasn't until Colonel Tom Buckner called him "Dave" and ast him about
his sister that I seen who Doctor Kirby must really be.

HE WAS THAT THERE DAVID ARMSTRONG!

And the brother of the girl he had run off with had jest saved his life.
By the way he was talking, he had saved it simply because he thought he
had the first call on what to do with it.

"Where is she?" asts Colonel Tom.

"I ask you," says Doctor Kirby--or David Armstrong--agin.

Well, I thinks to myself, here is where Daniel puts one acrost the
plate. And I breaks in:

"You both got another guess coming," I says. "She ain't buried
anywheres. She ain't even dead. She's living in a little town in Indiany
called Athens--or she was about eighteen months ago."

They both looks at me like they thinks I am crazy.

"What do you know about it?" says Doctor Kirby.

"Are you David Armstrong?" says I.

"Yes," says he.

"Well," I says, "you spent four or five days within a stone's throw of
her a year ago last summer, and she knowed it was you and hid herself
away from you."

Then I tells them about how I first happened to hear of David Armstrong,
and all I had hearn from Martha. And how I had stayed at the Davises
in Tennessee and got some more of the same story from George, the old
nigger there.

"But, Danny," says the doctor, "why didn't you tell me all this?"

I was jest going to say that not knowing he was that the