ent to an out-dated
saddler's shop, and asked the owner, a veteran of his father's regiment,
"Welks, do you happen to have a cowhide among your antiquities?"

"Regular old style?" Welks returned. "Kind they make out of a cow's hide
and use on a man's?"

"Something of that sort," said Richard, with a slight smile.

The saddler said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an
upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking
thing in his hand. "I reckon that's what you're after, squire."

"Reckon it is, Welks," said Richard, drawing it through his tubed left
hand. Then he buttoned it under his coat, and paid the quarter which
Welks said had always been the price of a cowhide even since he could
remember, and walked away towards the station.

"How's the old colonel" Welks called after him, having forgotten to ask
before.

"The colonel's all right," Richard called back, without looking round.

He walked up and down in front of the station. A local train came in
from Ballardsville at 8.15, and waited for the New York special, and
then returned to Ballardsville. Richard had bought a ticket for that
station, and was going to take the train back, but among the passengers
who descended from it when it drew in was one who saved him the trouble
of going.

Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards him
with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after
his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen,
parted on either side of Richard, and left the two men confronted.
Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which
he caught securely into Bittridge's collar; then he began to beat him
with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting
shape. Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in
the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge,
the thing was done in perfect silence. The witnesses stood well back in
a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with
a twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat
dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked
homeward. Then one of them picked up Bittridge's hat and set it aslant
on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his
cravat.

For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely
found words coherent e