, every word of it; if Jimmy Grayson vouches for a thing, that
settles it; and here is a copy of the Grayville _Argus_; it has to be a
pretty good town that can publish as smart a daily as this."

He handed a neat sheet to Barton, who laughed.

"There speaks the great detective," he said. "You know, Harley, how
Hobart is always arguing from the effect back to the cause."

Hobart, in fact, was not a political writer, but a "murder mystery" man,
and the best of his kind in New York, but the regular staff
correspondent of his paper, the _Leader_, being ill, he had been sent in
his place. He was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman with a taste for
poetry, but he had a peculiar mind, upon which a murder mystery acted as
an irritant--he could not rest until he had solved it--and his paper
always put him on the great cases, such as those in which a vast
metropolis like New York abounds. Now he was restless and discontented;
the tour seemed to him the mere reporting of speeches and obvious
incidents that everybody saw; there was nothing to unravel, nothing that
called for the keen edge of a fine intellect.

"Grayville, with all its advantages as a place of rest, is sure to be
like the other mountain towns," he said, somewhat sourly--"the same
houses, the same streets, the same people, I might almost say the same
mountains. There will be nothing unusual, nothing out of the way."

Harley had taken the paper from Barton's hands and was reading it.

"At any rate, if Grayville is not unusual, it is to have an unusual
time," he interrupted.

"How so?"

"It is to hear Jimmy Grayson speak Monday, and it is going to hang a man
Tuesday. See, the two events get equal advance space, two columns each,
on the front page."

He handed the paper to Hobart, who looked at it a little while and then
dropped it with an air of increasing discontent.

"That may mean something to the natives," he said; "it may be an
indication to them that their place is becoming important--a metropolis
in which things happen--but it is nothing to me. This hanging case is
stale and commonplace; it is perfectly clear; a young fellow named Boyd
is to be hanged for killing his partner, another miner; no doubt about
his guilt, plenty of witnesses against him, his own denial weak and
halting--in fact, half a confession; jury out only five minutes; whole
thing as bald and flat as this plain through which we are running."

He tapped with his finger on the dusty ca