. Again and again I have wondered about that dream. I came to and
lifted my head and my consciousness swung back upon the track of memory
and took up the thread of the day, the briefest remove from where it had
broken.

I peered through the bushes. The light was unchanged. I could see quite
clearly. The horses were gone. It was very still. The stranger lay
helpless in the road and a figure was bending over him. It was a man
with a handkerchief hanging over his face with holes cut opposite his
eyes. He had not seen my fall and thought, as I learned later, that I
had ridden away.

His gun lay beside him, its stock toward me. I observed that a piece of
wood had been split off the lower side of the stock. I jumped to my feet
and seized a stone to hurl at him. As I did so the robber fled with gun
in hand. If the gun had been loaded I suppose that this little history
would never have been written. Quickly I hurled the stone at the robber.
I remember it was a smallish stone about the size of a hen's egg. I saw
it graze the side of his head. I saw his hand touch the place which the
stone had grazed. He reeled and nearly fell and recovered himself and
ran on, but the little stone had put the mark of Cain upon him.

The stranger lay still in the road. I lifted his head and dropped it
quickly with a strange sickness. The feel of it and the way it fell back
upon the ground when I let go scared me, for I knew that he was dead.
The dust around him was wet. I ran down the hill a few steps and stopped
and whistled to my filly. I could hear her answering whinny far down the
dusty road and then her hoofs as she galloped toward me. She came within
a few feet of me and stood snorting. I caught and mounted her and rode
to the nearest house for help. On the way I saw why she had stopped. A
number of horses were feeding on the roadside near the log house where
Andrew Crampton lived. Andrew had just unloaded some hay and was backing
out of his barn. I hitched my filly and jumped on the rack saying:

"Drive up the road as quick as you can. A man has been murdered."

What a fearful word it was that I had spoken! What a panic it made in
the little dooryard! The man gasped and jerked the reins and shouted to
his horses and began swearing. The woman uttered a little scream and the
children ran crying to her side. Now for the first time I felt the dread
significance of word and deed. I had had no time to think of it before.
I thought of the robb