shed all thought of his first wife and was preparing his
trousseau for a comfortable wedding, with Pa Tescheron controlled and
delivered by me at the altar, ready to speak his little piece.

It was a shame for Tescheron to keep those boys running all night, but
he did. This came next:

"I'll have my men at the autopsy, but I shall not be there, so you
see our pictures will not be printed, as you seem to fear. I do not
understand you. Don't you realize what your position is if this crime
is revealed? Do not delay further, but come at once. TESCHERON."

In my next I assured him that all our pictures would be printed, for he
would be served by subpoena from the coroner, unless he and his family
left the State before 8 o'clock.

And so it went, till finally I sent him a line saying that I would guard
the murderer all night and meet him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 9 A. M.
on my way to the coroner's.

Then I turned in and forgot all Jim's troubles. It must have been about
4 A. M.

Now, if early that evening I had learned my lesson, I might have minded
my own business, gone to bed early, and, like a wise man, awakened early
and left the house before it all happened.

It was just as I had predicted a hundred times, so I was not surprised
afterward when I learned how it was. A short time after I went to sleep,
Jim was overcome by the fidgets again and took one of those Turkish
baths invented by his home folks. This style of bath was pure turkey. It
was a regular turkey gobbler system of bathing and I had never heard the
like of it before I began to live with Jim. The way to know a man is to
live with him when he's in love. It was different in a number of ways
from any country custom I had ever heard of up North, but all Jim's
folks did it regularly, so he had told me, because they thought it was
the greatest thing in the world for a person who felt out of sorts. I
had been over to his house many and many a time, but it so happened that
I never saw his dad or his ma, or in fact any of them, sitting on their
kitchen stove.

Jim rigged up the bath in our flat kitchen with a lot of care. First he
would take our set of three sad-irons--the kind that are run with the
same handle, especially designed to press trousers under a wet rag--and
he would put them on top of the range, one under each leg of a chair as
far as they would go, and an old tin cup bottom-side-up under the fourth
leg. He was always particular