The Hermit of Turkey Hollow

I

“All the same,” affirmed “Skinny the Tramp,” “some one o’ these days them bugs’ll wiggle themselves off’n their pins—an’ do for ye!”

The “Hermit of Turkey Hollow” laughed derisively as he paused in pinning a large gray moth against the wall of the shanty.

“That’s all bunk!” he asserted with a show of bravado which, however, concealed a certain uneasiness. “When a thing’s dead—it’s dead! And that’s the end of it!” he added, pushing in the pin firmly until the moth, giving a final flutter, remained motionless.

Skinny shook his head.

“No, it ain’t!” said he with conviction. “Nuthin’ ever really dies—or, if it does, that ain’t the end of it by any manner o’ means! Your body kin die—like a cocoon—but somethin’ goes on after—like the butterfly.”

The Hermit threw a nervous glance in the direction of the moth, and then, evidently reassured, nonchalantly removed a piece of cut plug from his trousers pocket, bit off an end and held it out to the tramp, who bisected the remainder.

“But the butterfly dies—” concluded the Hermit decisively, “and then that’s the end of it—for good an’ all!”

Skinny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked round the smelly little shanty, the sides of which were decorated with a heterogeneous collection of defunct beetles, moths and butterflies.

“The butterfly don’t die—no more’n the cocoon!” declared he. “Nuthin’ dies. The moth flies away out o’ the cocoon, and then—when the moth dies—somethin’ flies away out o’ the moth.”

“But you can’t see nuthin’,” remarked the Hermit with significance.

“I don’t know whether ye can or not!” replied the tramp noncommittally. “Some says ye can an’ some says ye can’t. Some claim they’ve photographed the human soul!”

“What do them as claim ye can see it say it’s like?” inquired the Hermit in a tone of incredulity, in which nevertheless were mingled awe and curiosity.

“Mostly like a butterfly—somethin’ with wings—so’s it kin fly, I s’pose.”

“Huh!” retorted the Hermit. “Just pure bull! That moth, now—how can you say it ain’t dead?”

Skinny’s jaws relinquished their extreme vigor of motion, as he leaned forward earnestly towards the Hermit.

“Listen, Bo!” he adjured him. “You think you know all about bugs, an’ worms, an’ snakes, an’ yerbs, an’ trees, an’ weather. An’ I reckon you do, too! But you don’t ponder none compared to me. I don’t do nuthin’ but think, ’cause I ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I lie an’ meditate most all the time. And I hear things—and sense ’em. Sometimes I sit harkenin’ all night long. I know a lot more’n most folks about things you can’t see.”

“I don’t say you don’t, Skinny!” admitted the Hermit politely. “I don’t deny it!”

“There’s two worlds,” affirmed the tramp. “One you kin see an’ smell an’ touch and one that you ordinarily can’t—right alongside t’other. But sometimes—dependin’ on circumstances—you can catch a glimpse of what’s goin’ on there—see ’em an’ hear ’em. You’ve seen ghosts!”

“Sure, I’ve seen ghosts. Everybody’s seen ’em!” readily assented his companion.

“Well,” continued the tramp, “everythin’ has a ghost—walkin’ right along beside it all the time—only it’s in that other world—the one you don’t see.”

“But things don’t have ghosts!” declared the Hermit. “A thing must have been alive sometime to have a ghost.”

“Everything’s alive!” asserted the tramp. “Rocks an’ trees an’ flowers an’ water an’ fire an’ bugs an’ beasts as well as folks,—an’ they all have ghosts an’ none of ’em ever die. An’ they all have a right to live in the world they’re in until they naturally pass on into the other. Now, when they go—maybe they go one way, maybe another; but they all do go; and some folks claim to have seen ’em. An’ mostly they go with wings—flyin’—shaped like a moth or somethin’ like that.”

The Hermit spat disdainfully through the open doorway.

“Huh!” he remarked with sarcasm. “An’ I s’pose,—you’d say,—when I die I’ll go flyin’ away like a big gray moth?”

“Like as not!” returned Skinny cheerfully. “Like as not! You got to go somehow, ain’t ye?”

“All bull!” repeated the Hermit. “You’re just a nut!”

“Just the same!” returned Skinny the Tramp, “leavin’ out entirely me bein’ a nut, I wouldn’t kill anythin’ that’s alive an’ can feel—for money! I hate even to put an axe to a tree an’ see the sap ooze out. How do we know it ain’t sufferin’? An’ when it comes to live things—I’d be skeert!”

He let his eyes wander over the shanty walls thickly populated with tiny corpses and shuddered slightly.

“Yus! I’d be skeert to live in this house! Sometime they’ll have their vengeance!—An’—just as I said,—one o’ these days, they’ll come wigglin’ off’n them pins an’—do fer ye!”

“An’ then,” mocked the Hermit of Turkey Hollow, “I’ll flutter off out the winder like I was a moth! Bull, Skinny! All bull!”

* * * * * *

As may be inferred from the foregoing conversation the Hermit of Turkey Hollow lived in the world of Fact, while Skinny the Tramp dwelt in that of Faith,—which is to say, of Truth. Yet, as odd sticks, there was little to choose between them. As being a house dweller—and not a mere vagrant open to all the insidious imputations of vagabondage—the Hermit may of the two have been entitled to greater social recognition, but being a recluse, although something of a curiosity and hence in the nature of a local asset,—he was practically negligible as a factor in the life of the neighborhood. Skinny the Tramp, on the other hand, was a sociable sort of being who lived in the open, not because he loved his fellows less but because he loved nature more.

Turkey Hollow lies three miles to the north and east of the thriving town of Pottsville in the Mohawk Valley of the Empire State, surrounded by low hills still thickly covered with second growth timber; in spots, especially where Chasm Brook flows down into the westerly end of Turtle Pond, wet and marshy; and elsewhere filled with a tangled growth of Getchel birch, swamp maple, and alder, save for the acre or so of cleared upland above the lake where stands the Hermit’s now deserted shanty.

On the whole, the original turkeys having for several decades been entirely extinct, the hollow offered no attractions to anybody, save possibly to naturalists impervious to mosquito bites. It was in truth a dank sort of place, full of underbrush, and inaccessible except by the wood road leading to the Hermit’s abode, which some years he cleared out and some he didn’t, and where you had to go afoot anyway.

Nevertheless, once you got there, you found that the hermit was a genuine up-to-date hermit, with most of the modern improvements. For he was neither a hundred years old with a bald pate and long white whiskers like William Cullen Bryant or Father Time; nor did he mutter incantations over a seething caldron like the witches in Macbeth, or meander aimlessly about prattling to himself as conventional hermits are supposed to do. And his shanty was no cave, but on the contrary a comfortable enough one-story shack, with windows of glass which, while they were nailed down tight and hence could not be opened, allowed plenty of light to stream in. By the door usually stood a butterfly net, a fish rod, and a hoe and spade,—for he had a small garden where he raised such vegetables as he needed,—and on one side of the shanty was a table, on the other his cot, over which by day was thrown a discolored “comfortable,” while directly “on ax” with the door and between the two rear windows was a tall, old-fashioned clock—the only article of any value in the place.

This was, indeed, rather a strange object to be in the middle of the woods and as it was of shining mahogany, its face decorated with the sun, moon and stars, ships, savages and zodiacal signs, it was an object of comment and surmise to the few who visited the place. No one ventured to ask where it had come from or how the hermit had acquired it, but he had been once heard to say that it made less noise than a woman, talked no nonsense, and was all the company anyone had need of. Even those who had never seen the hermit himself knew that he had a clock. That is the way of things. People will refer for years to a man as “the old chap who always wears that pair of gray trousers” and then accidentally discover that he is a world famous civil engineer or retired statesman who has swayed the fate of nations. So the hermit was known by his clock; although regularly once a week he walked to Pottsville to get his mail and buy groceries. For being an up-to-date hermit he was not without an occupation,—he drank; and he did it very well.

He was a large, lumbering man of about sixty years, full-bearded, bent, frankly ungiven to washing and generally a shade woozy in the upper story; and nobody could remember Turkey Hollow when he had not been there.

He was reputed to be possessed of mysterious, ill-gotten wealth hidden in and about the clearing, and, in spite of his squalor, the rumor acquired a certain cachet owing to the fact that his correspondence, regularly inspected by Constable Higgins out of abundant caution, consisted almost entirely of get-rich-quick-circulars and similar catch-penny advertisements. His name, which otherwise might never have been known, was Wilbur Drake,—although he was never referred to as anything but the “Hermit of Turkey Hollow.” That was his sum total—to the world at large.

Yet sometime and somewhere, he had perhaps been somebody; and nailed over his cot in a tarnished oaken frame was a dingy photograph of a dumpy little girl in pigtails. Why this sick soul had sought seclusion nobody knew and nobody cared, yet afterwards, although he was morose, taciturn and brutal in his manners, the Pottsville folk were sorry for him and regretted that they had not been kinder to him.

Skinny the Tramp was a totally different type of bird,—a “character” as they all said, beloved of the village children and regarded with good-natured tolerance by their elders. He was tall, lean, hawkish, with the traditional stubble about his chin and neck, which a Byronic negligée exposed to wind and weather. He belonged to Pottsville in his own way quite as much as did the hermit, for in spite of his peripatetic sojournings, he was a native of the town and, as James Hawkins, had passed those earlier days—before manual labor had been abhorrent to him—in its vicinity, having been even at one time admitted to the lowlier degrees of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries. This famous order, however, he had ultimately abandoned in favor of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides, of which he was now a member in good standing.

The reader will, of course, appreciate that for various reasons,—including that we may sometime run for public office—the foregoing names and titles are fictitious; but the organizations themselves are not, and each in its own way exerts an influence not lightly to be disregarded, whether one be a yokel on the one hand, or a yegg on the other. Twice yearly, once on his annual autumn trip to the Golden West and again on his return therefrom in the spring, Hawkins, emaciated, hairy, black from coal dust, dropped lightly off the truck of some fast freight and revisited the scenes of his youth.

Sitting upon a cracker barrel in Colson’s Grocery—so that nutriment might be the more easily accessible—Skinny the Tramp, like some wandering scop, bard, or friar of medieval days—would fill the wagging ears of the countryside with the narrative of his later wanderings in search of the treasure that somehow always just managed to elude his grasp. For Skinny believed absolutely that at the foot of every rainbow there was a Crock of Gold, and he would have gladly died for his belief—as any gentleman and sportsman would have done, and as he came very near to doing in this case.

However, while Skinny chased rainbows he declined to do so afoot—preferring the artificial and speedier means of transportation afforded by the transcontinental railroad systems, from the trains of which he was habitually—and at divers times and places, ignominiously,—hurled, to his great physical and temperamental detriment. Yet, albeit that he was a high officer of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides and had once been an Abyssinian Brother of that elevation known as the “Order of the Sacred Camel of King Menelik,” from which noble association he had been swiftly dropped for non-payment of dues, he was, like a multitude of his fellow wanderers, merely a harmless child of good-nature, nearly a half-wit, essentially a devotee of Zoroaster, who spent his life following the sun. On these biennial visits Skinny hung about the town, spending a goodly portion of his time—both by night and by day—sleeping in a lean-to on the hillside above Turkey Hollow, and part of it wandering through the woods,—but always looking for the rainbow that should empty a hoard of gold into his tattered lap.

Twice yearly also passed through Pottsville the “Sons and Daughters of the Southland”—the Zingara Gipsies,—in auto trucks and flivvers—camping for a time on the end of the old, deserted racetrack,—a sinister crew, surreptitious panderers to credulity and lust, the men surly and brutal, the women insolent and dirty, but attracting the imaginative and susceptible bumpkins as a trickle of molasses will draw a swarm of flies. When in the night they folded their tents and stole silently away the citizens of Pottsville invariably discovered that many of their most cherished personal possessions were unaccountably missing. But no one cared to pursue and prosecute them. They were too dangerous. Besides, they could have told things.

In the case of Skinny the Tramp there was, however, a practical as well as a sentimental reason for these half-yearly stop-overs, the legal necessity of his putting in a personal appearance to claim and receipt for the one hundred dollars of income which accrued to his account every six months from the trust fund created by his mother in her last will and testament, of which the Honorable—or “Squire”—Hezekiah Mason was executor. And as Squire Mason is one of the central figures in this legal tragi-comedy it may perhaps be worth while to stop for a moment at this point and give him what might be called the “literary once-over.”

Let us state frankly, without circumlocution or evasion, that while Hezekiah was known as “honorable” and “squire,” this grim visaged, tight-lipped country attorney was neither. He was “honorable” only in a Pickwickian sense; and a “squire” only by courtesy; but why or how any courtesy should have been extended to him remained a mystery, since he was the most unpopular man in the county,—evidenced by the fact that he alone of Pottsville’s masculine élite—which included the barber, druggist, sheriff and dentist—was not one of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik, and needless to say it rankled in his dried peapod of a soul.

Nevertheless, the Hon. Hezekiah was a power for he had mortgages on a majority of the farms of Somerset County already and his tentacles were reaching out along the county highways and by-ways after the others. Moreover, he was the only lawyer practising in either Pottsville or Somerset Corners so that, in one way or another, he managed to be mixed up in almost everything that went on. However, he couldn’t break into the mystic circle of The Abyssinian Brotherhood, which has a distinct bearing on our narrative. As Sheriff Moses Higgins,—who was the Grand Supreme Exalted Patriarch and Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik—had said at the lodge meeting held three months before in the P. of H. (No. 769) Hall when Hezekiah had made his final attempt to become one of the genus dromedary and had been flatly and contumaciously turned down, refused, rejected, rebuffed and repudiated—I repeat, as Sheriff Higgins had said on that well known occasion, it made no difference how big a feller’s bank account was if he was a stinker, and everybody who had an atom of brains fer fifty miles ’round knew all-fired well what kind of a cuss Mason was. Get a feller like that into the Camels and you never could get rid of him—“once a Camel always a Camel”—the whole herd would be contaminated. He’d sooner take in “Nigger” Jo, the colored ostler over to the Phoenix House stable. He spoke fifteen minutes and there wasn’t a white ball in the box when it was passed.

So Squire Mason nursed his antique grudge and took his revenge in coin of the realm. Then came the turn of the wheel and Hezekiah found himself in a position where by the adroit application of five thousand dollars where it would do most good he could get a strangle hold on one of the leading politicians of the county. The fact that the only funds available were those he held as trustee for James Hawkins was the merest incident and did not disturb him even momentarily. They were at hand and he used them. Skinny was only a tramp. He might get run over any day, just as, fortunately for Hezekiah, was Lawyer Tompkins, of Felchville, the public prosecutor of Somerset, for whose vacant job the Honorable Squire Mason instantly applied. As he had a cinch on the local political boss, and as the attorney general needed the influence of the boss in his own business, and as the attorney general had a cinch on the governor—he won in a walk and duly became, by official appointment and designation, for Tompkins’ unexpired term, district attorney of Somerset County, and having, after forty years of plodding obscurity, suddenly found himself elevated to office he instantly became consumed by the fire of ambition. While Cicero says that “the noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory,” we do not intend by this mere statement of fact to entwine with any wreath of bay or laurel the perspiring brow of Hezekiah. Objectively Mason was a bombastic, old-fashioned country lawyer, acrid, dry as dust, entirely unscrupulous, and, while superficially shrewd, on the whole rather dull. Noise was his strong point, and there was not a tougher pair of leather lungs in the Mohawk Valley, down which he now looked with longing eyes towards the capital at Albany, hoping perhaps to roar loud enough so that he could be heard there, which at times seemed by no means impossible. Once ambition stirs a man’s soul no height appears too high for him to scale.

And now, having had one piece of luck, the lightning of fortune, as sometimes happens, struck him again.

Pottsville is the kind of “hick” town where the girls bob their hair and the boys wear the very latest “pineapple” cut, where you can buy “college ices” and “sundaes” at the drug store, but where the movies run only twice a week and the barber shop is open only after four o’clock on Saturdays. There is a smutty little wooden railroad station, a memorial library of funereal granite, a brick business block bearing date 1879, an octagonal horse-trough right in the middle of Main Street, and the rickety old Phoenix Hotel, run by “Ma” Best, née Louisa Barrows, whose dad, “Old Doc Barrows,” was sent up to Sing Sing for high-financing the countryside.

There are, in addition, two churches, Baptist and Methodist, each white with green shutters and a steeple,—a court house, the Mohawk Palace Theater (celluloid), the P. of H. Hall, the “Pottsville Dry Goods Emporium” belonging to “Toggery Bill” Gookin, Meachem’s Notion Store and Colson’s Grocery. The street is unpaved and from February to April is ankle high with mud. Such towns still survive even in the Empire State. But while Pottsville will refer to Somerset Corners five miles away as a “hick” town, it remains serenely oblivious of its own hickitude.

It was here that on a soft Saturday afternoon towards the end of April, Squire Mason’s great moment came—that opportunity knocked upon his office door and beckoned to him. And Hezekiah did not hesitate.

He had been more than usually sour all day, for he had quarreled with his wife at breakfast and when he reached the office he had found that a farmer over Felchville way whose mortgage he held—and on whose prompt payment he had relied to cover James Hawkins’ semiannual interest of like amount, had unexpectedly defaulted. And—curse it!—at eleven o’clock Skinny had come for his money, peering apologetically through the door like the half-wit that he was, twisting his faded bicycle cap between his fingers, almost afraid to ask the squire for what was his.

“Mornin’, squire,” he said, leaning awkwardly against the door jamb. “Been well, I trust?”

The Honorable Hezekiah Mason regarded the tramp malevolently.

“Tol’rable!” he replied curtly. “I s’pose you’ve come after your money.”

“Yes,” assented Skinny. “Still,” he added politely, “if it ain’t convenient——” His blue eyes roved vaguely around the barren room seeing nothing.

“Look here, Skinny!” remarked the lawyer gruffly, “what’s the use of my turning over a hundred dollars to you to throw away? Why don’t you let me keep it an’ invest it for you? The way you live ain’t provident. A penny saved is a penny earned, an’ a hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

“It’s very kind of you,” faltered Skinny, “but I don’t throw it away. Honest Injun, I don’t. It keeps me wanderin’—I’d like it if you kin let me have it.” He paused and took a timid step towards the squire. “May I ask you a question?”

Now the one thing in the world that Squire Mason did not want was any question from Hawkins about the whereabouts of his money. He had intended to put the tramp off, but now he swiftly changed his mind.

“Your money’s all right,” he retorted, getting to his feet. “You don’t need to worry any ’bout it! I’ll go get it fer you!”

“Thank you,” replied Skinny. “I was only goin’ to ask——”

But Mason had bolted through the door. Ten minutes later he returned and handed the tramp five twenty dollar bills, for which he took Skinny’s receipt.

“Now,” he remarked brusquely, “you’ve got your money. You better get along. I’m busy this mornin’!”

But Skinny had a matter of vital moment upon what by a euphemism might have been termed his mind. It had been troubling him ever since his conversation with the hermit with which this chronicle opens. And he wanted the opinion of Squire Mason, as a learned man who presumably knew all about such things.

“I’d like to ask you a question, squire!” he persisted.

Mason, cornered in his office, turned on him like a rat.

“Well,—ask it!” he snapped defiantly.

“I want to ask you if folks that know about such things think that when a thing’s dead it’s dead?”

The squire stared at him contemptuously.

“P’tah!” he ejaculated. “What are you ravin’ about?”

“About whether when folks die that’s the end of ’em,” explained Skinny. “And if it’s the same with the animals.”

Mason took courage. Skinny was not bothered about the safety of his principal.

“What’s the use conjecturin’ about things like that?” he asked more genially.

“It’s kinder important, ain’t it?” returned the tramp.

The lawyer pursed his lips and gazed for an instant through the window upon the sill of which a blue-bottle lay upon its back with its legs stiffly in air. Then he turned sententiously to the tramp.

“If you really want to know what I think,” he answered. “When a man’s dead, he’s dead.”

Skinny, his money in his pocket but troubled in his mind, made his way slowly back to Turkey Hollow. The sun, which had been shining when he had gone into the squire’s office, had become obscured by a bank of cloud and it looked like rain, but all about him as he strode through the woods the dogwoods were bursting into blossom amid a background of diaphanous budding green. The spring was stirring in him, too. A hundred dollars! Visions of purple valleys, of cool, trickling ravines dank with spreading ferns, of fragrant fields of hay in which to lie—without the necessity of chopping a single piece of kindling to pay for his supper—rose in his mind. Wouldn’t it be great to be rich! To lie in a hammock with a feather pillow under his head in the shade of an orange tree and a nigger to hand him cool drinks and sandwiches and gold-tipped cigarettes! To ride luxuriantly inside a Pullman car or stand on the clinking back platform of the Sunset Limited watching the misty mountains turn from azure to rose and from rose to lilac—and pitying the bums walking the sleepers. To sleep—sleep—sleep—in a big, soft bed! To have a man delicately remove the hair from your neck and chin and scent your cheeks with cologne water! To go into a grand hotel, bully the waiter, and eat everything on the bill of fare without asking the price! Money! That would do it. But a hundred dollars was only a flea bite! What he needed was the real kale—a whole pot of gold!

It had begun to rain by the time he had cooked his dinner, and afterwards, as he sat in the opening of his shack smoking cigarettes, it grew very dark and for half an hour poured down in torrents. Then as will happen in fickle April the sun burst forth and turned the leaden world into a dripping golden grotto, where every bough and twig and leaf’s edge gleamed with a jeweled setting of pearls and diamonds, and the hot mist rose shimmering from the steaming ground. Gold—gold everywhere! Gold—the mystic element sought of the alchemists and of the philosophies of ancient, medieval and modern times alike. Gold!

Suddenly Skinny stiffened and sat erect. Thrown against the torn black wind clouds of the departing storm was a great arch whose glowing colors pained the eye, a perfect piece of heavenly architecture. High it rose into the zenith a concentrated prismatic glory—emblem of the eternal hope that sprang in the tramp’s breast. One end of the arc came to earth far to the west—the golden west—and the other plunged down at his feet into Turkey Hollow. There was no doubt about it at all. Right into Turkey Hollow—right upon the hermit’s shanty, which he could see through the interlacing boughs of the hillside sharply defined as in a spotlight of saffron. Skinny started to his feet. If he could only reach the hermit’s shanty before the rainbow faded the crock of gold would be there. Sure! His mind never doubted it. It was there now. If he hurried—this time he might find it! Without a moment’s hesitation Skinny plunged down the hillside through the reeking undergrowth, drenched to the skin, slipping, falling now on beds of soaking moss, now over roots and stones—blood smearing his face and hands—until he crashed down through the clump of birches next the clearing.

A man was sitting there under a boulder smoking a pipe, his ax across his knees—waiting evidently for things to dry up a bit. He waved at Skinny, but the tramp was too intent to answer him. Then came the yellow gleam of the clearing through the brush and the shanty rose hard against the sky just beyond. Surely he must be in time!

He had emerged from the woods in the rear of the shanty on the edge of the potato patch and he did not trouble to go around it but plowed straight through the muddy rows, leaving a deep wake behind him across the loam. Panting and dripping with sweat, Skinny hurried to the nearest window of the shanty, the one above the hermit’s cot, and peeked in. What he saw made his heart stand still. The sun was pouring through the opposite window upon the back of the hermit, who sat bowed over the table; and in front of him—its overflowing contents sending yellow flashes darting into the dim recesses of the hut—stood a small red bean-pot or “crock”—still sticky with earth—filled with shining gold pieces. An expression of transcendental satisfaction illuminated Skinny’s face. His faith was justified—as he had known and predicted all along that eventually it would be. His confidence in his own mental processes and spiritual beliefs rebounded from where it had been crushed to earth by Squire Mason’s crass materialism. Stealthily—so as not to frighten the hermit—he crept towards the open door of the shanty.…

It was Charlie Emerson—the man sitting under the boulder with his ax across his knees—who heard the shot that killed the hermit. He was not a native of Pottsville, although he usually could be found there every spring, working over at Sampson’s steam lumber mill at the lower end of Turtle Pond. This particular Saturday he had got the afternoon off to fill an order for pea sticks which he purposed cutting from the birches which grew thick in the less swampy part of Turkey Hollow, and he was right in the middle of it when the thunderstorm came up and he had to stop for awhile until the sun should dry the bushes off.

He saw Skinny cruising through the underbrush and was puzzled by the fact that the tramp ignored his salutation. But he had gone on smoking and, after taking a short nap, had resumed his work on the pea sticks. Then, as the sun had begun to slant through the tree trunks and the shadow of the hill to come creeping across the marsh, the hot silence of the afternoon had been shattered first by a cry for help and then by a shot—both from the hermit’s shanty less than two hundred yards away. Ax in hand he made the distance through the thickets in less than three minutes, and as he broke cover into the clearing behind the house he saw the undergrowth moving on the other side and heard the snapping of twigs.

It was so still that he could hear the drone of a bee in the fringe of meadow-sweet down by the well, and—coupled with the cry—it gave him a weird creepy feeling such as he never knew before. But he took a good grip on himself, walked round the shanty, and looked in through the open door.

Everything was as usual—the clock, the cot, the rickety table, the chair, the fish rod and butterfly net, all were undisturbed—except that the hermit lay upon his back on the floor, his arms outstretched, the blood jetting from his mouth, a film gathering in his wide open eyes. Emerson knelt by the side of the dying man and gently lifted the great hairy head. The blood that came from his mouth made a queer guttering sound—grotesquely resembling to his agitated mind the faint clucking of a hen. Then the noise stopped; the hermit no longer breathed; and the lumberman as he lowered the hermit’s head to the floor heard the loud beat of an insect’s wings and observed a large gray moth flapping frantically against the window. He had seen a million moths—! Yet, with relief Emerson saw it vanish through the open doorway.

With averted face he threw the “comfortable” across the hermit’s body and, as he did so, noticed the broken fragments of a small, red clay pot lying beneath the table. One of the hermit’s hands protruded from beneath the coverlet—grasping tightly a single gold-piece. Emerson, standing in the stifling atmosphere of the hut, could hear no sound but the beating in his ears of his own heart.

The mill hand dashed from the shanty, marking the footprints in the garden patch, and hunted courageously for the murderer in the surrounding woods; but the criminal had too good a start. Then, with no doubt whatever in his mind as to who it had been, he ran down the wood road that joined the main highway half a mile from the shanty.

There had been a big gang assembled in Colson’s Grocery waiting for the barber shop to open next door when Skinny entered at almost precisely four o’clock by the Western Union automatically regulated clock over the candy counter; and, while nobody had paid much attention to him at the time, it was remembered distinctly afterwards that he had been breathing hard and excited, and had ordered a bottle of root beer and drank it with a sort of ostentatious, devil-may-care indifference. He had also remarked to someone that he had cut his finger in the woods, and his handkerchief was bloody.

Most of the crowd were still there when, fifteen minutes later, Charlie Emerson, the lumber man with the ax, reached the village with the news that the hermit had been murdered.

He came running down the road all splashed with mud and the fellows in Colson’s could hear him shouting nearly a furlong away. There was a general stampede for the street,—in which the occupants of the brick block, the barber shop, and the drug store all joined. Emerson came staggering along—stopping every few yards to yell “Murder!”—and brought up exhausted in front of the stairs leading to Squire Mason’s office, which was opposite the sheriff’s on the first landing.

“Th’ hermit’s been murdered!” he panted hysterically. “Shot right through the lungs!—Where’s the sheriff?—Gosh, it’s fierce!—Where’s Squire Mason?”

The crowd surged round him, Squire Mason’s head appeared at his window, and then, with a whoop, they all rushed up the stairs to the sheriff’s office. But Mason held the crowd back sternly on the landing.

“I’m prosecutor o’ this county!—I’ll take care o’ this witness!” he announced in a tone of authority. “Now some o’ you hustle over and fetch the sheriff—he’s gone down to the station fer the mail. An’ don’t none of you dare so much as move ’till he comes and tells you what to do.—Now, you!” to the ax-man—“Come into my office an’ let me take your deposition.”

There was a murmur of disappointment from the crowd as Mason firmly conducted Emerson inside and shut the door; but they all obediently poured down the stairs again after the sheriff. Then some one began to ring the fire alarm and, by the time Sheriff Higgins reached the horse trough, the mob was so dense in front of the doorway that he could hardly force his way through. He was inside less than a minute before he reappeared at Mason’s window.

“Anybody seen Skinny Hawkins?” he cried excitedly.

“He was here a minute ago!” answered someone.

“I seen him walkin’ off down the road towards the race track—just afore the bell began ringin’!” yelled up a small boy.

“Well!” shouted Higgins, “get after him an’ stop him.—Don’t let him get away!”

The next instant the pack were in full cry.

* * * * * *

Perhaps if Skinny hadn’t been a half-wit he wouldn’t have run. Perhaps he should have pulled himself together—and with his pockets full of the hermit’s gold and his boots covered with mud from the hermit’s potato patch—he should have boldly answered: “Here I am! What do you want of me?” and marched up to the sheriff’s office. But, on the other hand, perhaps many a more sensibly-minded man than he under the same unfortunate circumstances would have taken to his legs. Admit, it was a foolish and useless thing to do! We have all on occasion lost our nerve—even if we all be wise men. And certainly Skinny was not wise!

He could not deny having been in the hermit’s company within half an hour, the gold was on his person, the mud upon his feet. He had been caught almost, had his addled memory retained the phrase, in flagrante delicto. Being a tramp, used to rough treatment even from ordinarily kind people, accustomed to be called a vagabond and a thief and to have the dogs set upon him, familiar from long experience with his brother hoboes with tales of tortures and lynchings in which the knotted rope and kerosene figured vividly, Skinny fled in a hysteria of fear down the road towards the race track and thence across the fields into the woods.

He was less than three minutes ahead of the crowd at the start and unfortunately for him the sheriff’s flivver was standing in front of the drug store, so that by the time he took cover they were actually at his heels. Moreover, a dozen of the older boys sensing that he might try to beat back towards the Hollow ran up the crossroad to cut him off. The fact that most of them liked him was nothing. A chase was a chase. Hare and hounds,—while it lasted. Besides, this was a hunt for a murderer—and flight was equivalent to confession.

Badly winded, Skinny crashed through the woods, the shouts of his pursuers close in his ears. Ahead he could see the blue sky through the trees where the fields began again. He reached the edge and came dead upon a man plowing. Faintly borne on the wind he heard the distant clang of the fire bell and a couple of revolver shots from nearer at hand. “Putt!” they said. “Putt-putt!” Skinny did not like the sound of them. He ducked back and ran like a fagged fox along the hedge by the field, then paused to listen again. There was a crackling in the brush to the left while just beyond, on the other side of the open, the barber and the drug clerk, who had followed a wood road suddenly appeared staring directly at him.

“Hi!” yelled the barber, waving his razor which he had carried in his hand. “Hi! Here he is! This way!”

The crackling behind him grew louder. He could see shadows stealthily creeping from tree to tree. Of course they thought him armed! They might shoot! He did not know what to do. He did not want either to be carved up by the barber or to be blown to bits by a shotgun. His tongue was like a baked potato and his lungs ached as if with rheumatism. He could hardly see. There they were—hundreds of them—!

“ ’S all right, Bill!” he called hoarsely. “I ain’t tryin’ to git away.”

And he staggered out a few feet between the furrows and fell in a faint. It was characteristic of him that he had made no attempt to throw away the hermit’s gold.

Twenty minutes later “Ma” Best, who had been quietly cooking in the Phoenix House kitchen throughout the whole disturbance, heard a great shouting down the road and went to the door to see what it was all about. Over by the “deppo” she could see a crowd of men and boys pushing or dragging somebody in their midst. The smaller of the boys danced and capered ahead of the throng, one of them turning fancy “cartwheels.” Then came Sheriff Higgins, stalking along importantly, two men with shotguns on either side of him, followed by the barber, Mr. Perkins the proprietor of the Mohawk Palace, and old Colson the grocer. Directly behind this cluster of notables—who in a grotesque way suggested a group of Roman senators escorted by their lictors—at an interval of perhaps ten feet, walked Skinny the tramp, his face pale as that of the murdered hermit, hatless, a rope around his neck, and his hands bound behind his back. The end of the rope was held by no less a personage than “Toggery Bill” Gookin, who providentially had happened to be returning from a visit to Zayda the Zingara Gipsy fortune teller at the moment of Skinny’s capture. From time to time the haberdasher would jerk the rope as if the tramp were a horse and the more light-minded in the crowd would cluck and call out “Geddap!” For the rest, they swarmed along in a mob, yelling, joking, uttering cat-calls and other vague and meaningless noises.

“What’s the trouble, sheriff?” called out “Ma” Best. “What yer doin’ with Skinny?”

The dignity of Sheriff Higgins did not permit him to make reply. Instead the crowd yelled at her generally.

“ ’S killed the hermit!” shouted an urchin. “Murdered him!—Whoop-ee! Hurray!”

“Murder nuthin’!” snorted “Ma” Best. “You’re jest a pack of idiots.—Skinny wouldn’t kill a spider!”

“Whee-uup! Whoop! Hurray!” shrieked the crowd in the delight of having conducted a successful man-hunt, jumping around “Toggery Bill” and his victim, as a pack of hounds will jump, snapping and barking about the body of the fox they have run to earth. “Whee-uup! Hurray!—Lynch him! String him up!”

They had reached the horse-trough and the two men with the shotguns held back the crowd while Sheriff Higgins relieved “Toggery Bill” of the rope and led Skinny upstairs to his office. In a moment the sheriff appeared at the window.

“Feller citizens of Pottsville!” he shouted. “In the name o’ the People of the State of New York I call on ye to disperse peaceable and go to your homes. There ain’t goin’ to be no lynchin’ nor nuthin’ like that. Skinny’s goin’ to the jail and he’s goin’ to stay there until the Grand Jury has acted on his case which will be day after to-morrer. Now, there’s no use kickin’ up any fuss or ruction and I warn ye not to go near Turkey Hollow. Kindly disperse!”

Skinny the Tramp having been treated to a brief and exceedingly crude variety of the “third degree” in the sheriff’s office, and having “stood mute,” was transferred to the calaboose, where Sam Bellows, who, owing to his obesity, could not take any more active part, was set to watch him. It is doubtful whether Skinny would have made any further attempt to get away, even if “paroled in his own custody”; for his flight had been the instant, automatic reaction from a paroxysm of terror in which he visioned himself as a human torch—not the result of any genuine hope that he could escape the processes of the law, for whose far-reaching effectiveness he had in fact a vast respect.

Now that he had been brought back without having been lynched, his instinct told him to hold his tongue. He was no match for them—not even for Sheriff Higgins—and he knew it. If he said anything they would twist it somehow against him. His only hope lay in the quantum of evidence. Nobody had seen him at the hermit’s shanty, so why admit that he had been there? That was only common caution. Anybody could have gold pieces; and if he had left any tracks there was no way of proving when they had been made. So Skinny obstinately refused to open his mouth, and sat on a decayed chair in the unsanitary box resembling a flagman’s shanty which passed for a jail while the youth—the extreme youth—of Pottsville sat in rows around Sam Bellows, dividing their attention between comments upon his beauty of person and audible conjectures as to the probable fate of the murderer within.

Contemporaneously Squire Mason, having in his office reduced to written form the testimony of Emerson the lumberman, unexpectedly realized that he was confronted by a disturbing problem in legal ethics. Here he was, hardly appointed district attorney a week before the most sensational murder ever committed in the county had occurred at his very door! It was his chance!—the chance of a lifetime!—a sure conviction! But—and here was the rub!—were his relations to the accused such that he could properly conduct the case against him? At best could he take any more active part in the trial than as a mere witness, considering the fact that he was trustee of the tramp’s money and bore to him the confidential relationship of lawyer to client? Could he even appear against him as a witness? Might not the half-wit, indeed, have had murder in his mind that very morning when he had asked him if “anything ever really died?” The squire’s hopes wilted at the thought and his heart fell. Why, it was the biggest opportunity for legitimate notoriety since the Rosenthal murder! It was ridiculous to let a little thing like the fact that he was Skinny’s trustee make any difference! No one would in fact need to know? If Skinny remained mute, as he apparently intended to do, it probably would never come to light,—at any rate not until Hawkins had been convicted, and then it would sink into insignificance in the blaze of his glory. There was nothing to connect him with Skinny in any way, for the five twenty-dollar bills which he had delivered to the tramp that morning had not been found upon him when he was arrested. No,—the chance was worth taking. A brave man would take it; and fortune always favored the brave!

Squire Mason, however, was not the only brave man in Pottsville, for Sheriff Moses Higgins meanwhile had started for Turkey Hollow to make an examination of the scene of the crime. With him in the flivver officially designated as “Lizzie” were Emerson, the lumberman, the two armed deputies and Mr. Pennypacker, the photographer from Somerset Corners, for the sheriff was up on all the latest modern methods of detecting crime and knew just how it should be done. And some day they would all have to be witnesses and testify to exactly what they had seen.

They left the flivver where the wood road from the Hollow joined the highway and walked in the rest of the way on foot. It was a circumstance commented on by all of them that the sheriff’s order, that nobody should visit the scene of the murder until he had done so, had been strictly obeyed. But the ghastly corpse of a murdered man is its own best guardian—particularly if it be that of a hermit lying in his blood—alone in a bosky, lonely spot—with evening coming on. The peaceful inhabitants of Pottsville had no great hankering to see how the dead hermit looked, much preferring the less grim sport of tramp-baiting. So the five men met no one on their way; neither did any sound break the silence of the woods about them.

An unexpected pall descended upon their spirits. It had been great sport to jump into a motor with guns and cameras, and whirr off consequentially in a cloud of dust, leaving the staring crowd gazing enviously after them. They had even cracked jokes while they were on the road. But now, with the sun already behind the ridge that framed the Hollow upon which the shadows were closing steadily as if night were about to clutch it in its fingers, with no sound save the creak of their own boots or the gibber of a chipmunk in the alders to break the deathly silence of the woods, they found conversation difficult. The men with the shotguns felt fairly comfortable—although of course it would be a cinch for anybody lurking in the bushes to shoot the lot of them. But Sheriff Higgins, who although a sheriff and the Supreme Exalted Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik had never seen a dead body and was more of a “family man” than a bloodhound, and “Cy” Pennypacker, whose most daring adventure had been to invite Zayda the Zingara vamp to his studio to be photographed—for which he paid heavily afterwards at home, and who now, owing to the weight of his camera and plate holders, found difficulty in keeping up with the others,—both these worthies secretly began to wish that they could escape the duty which lay before them.

“Ssh!” suddenly whispered Emerson, and they all jumped; then stood tensely in their tracks.

Far up on the dark hillside could be heard at intervals of a few seconds the snapping of twigs.

“That’s a long ways off!” said the sheriff inconsequently.

They resumed their pilgrimage at a somewhat lessened pace; but at last they could see the opening-up of the trees against the sky that marked the hermit’s clearing.

“Hold up a second!” remarked the sheriff nervously. “Le’s decide about this thing! Suppose you fellers with the guns go first—so’s to be all ready—an’ then I’ll come right along——”

“Look here, Moses,” retorted one of the gunmen. “I ain’t got no partic’lar objection to goin’ first, but you’re sheriff an’ I reckon it’s up to you.”

Mr. Higgins hesitated. As Patriarch of the Sacred Camels it would not do to permit any intimation of pusillanimity upon his part to get abroad.

“Guess you’re right!” he remarked carelessly. “Gimme the gun.”

“What for?” demanded its owner. “You don’t need no gun to shoot a dead man!”

“I know that ’s well as you do!” retorted the sheriff. “But wha’d you bring a gun fer if there wasn’t no use fer it?—Le’s go up together!”

Thus reinforced the sheriff and his companion cautiously approached the open door of the hermit’s shanty, on which the shadow of the ridge had already fallen and was now slipping across the potato patch towards the edge of the woods. On the threshold they paused. Then the sheriff, swallowing, thrust in his head. It was so dark that at first he could see only the face of the hermit’s old clock leering at him out of the dusk. Then gradually he made out the crumpled bundle that had been the hermit, lying in front of it. A grimy fist protruded from beneath the covering. The sheriff bent over gingerly and took hold of one corner of the comfortable. Then he withdrew his hand quickly. The bedding had been lying upon the floor and was soaked in blood.

“God!” shrieked the sheriff and tottered out of the shanty.

“What’s th’ matter?” demanded Emerson rudely.

“There’s blood on everything—all over the place!” gasped Higgins.

“Well,—didn’t you look at him?” continued the lumberman brutally.

“I’m goin’ to, soon’s I kin git the blood off’n my hands!” returned the sheriff valiantly.

He rubbed his fingers ostentatiously in the grass. Then he crept back to the door of the shanty and looked in. The man with the gun poked the comfortable off the hermit’s body.

“P’thah!” coughed the sheriff recoiling. “P’thah!—Somebody else search that body—I can’t!”

He leaned heavily against the outside of the shanty and lowered his head.

Nobody in Pottsville went to bed that night, and next day both local clergymen preached rival sermons upon the text, “Thou shalt not kill.” Also, although few of the inhabitants had taken the slightest interest in the hermit during his life, except to deride him as a crank and a drunkard, there was universal mourning for him now that he was dead; for it was felt that in a way his presence in the Hollow had given a certain distinction to the township which otherwise it would not have had. It was a great moment for Pottsville. And so were the days following during which the Grand Jury indicted Skinny for murder and the case of “The People vs. James Hawkins” gradually built itself up, block by block, “line upon, line,” “here a little and there a little,” circumstance upon circumstance, until his guilt seemed established beyond the utmost requirement of the law.

Then the gipsies, having weathered the rather superficial investigation of the prosecutor, moved on to the “Sunny Southland” or wherever it was that they were going, and six weeks later Local Lodge No. 948 of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries convened at Somerset Corners to debate whether the fact that James Hawkins was an ex-member entitled him to pecuniary assistance for the purpose of retaining counsel, upon the broad theory that once a Sacred Camel of King Menelik—“always a camel.” For he had given the high-sign for help and the Treasury of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides was empty,—since the twenty shiny new five-dollar gold pieces which had been found in Skinny’s pocket upon his arrest had been removed therefrom and now reposed in the safe of the district attorney as evidence against him.

Thus came opportunity to the door of Hezekiah Mason for the second time; for in his widely heralded prosecution of Skinny the tramp, he perceived “a stepping stone to higher things,”—not on his own “dead self” but on the “dead selves” of Skinny and the hermit. Had not one well-known public prosecutor, he told himself, leaped into the gubernatorial saddle, and for a space held the reins of office, merely because he had convicted a policeman of participating in the murder of a gambler? Why should not he do the same for convicting a distinguished tramp of the murder of a famous hermit? Indeed, who shall quarrel with his logic?

“Tutt,” said Mr. Ephraim Tutt, of the well-known, if not celebrated, law firm of Tutt & Tutt, on entering his office the morning after the meeting of the Abyssinian Brothers, “kindly take a look at this!” And he held out a night-letter telegram.

“Somerset Corners, N.Y.

“Tutt & Tutt, Attorneys-at-Law,

“61 Broadway, N. Y. City.

“Local Lodge Nine Hundred and Forty-eight, Abyssinian Brotherhood, desires retain you to defend James Hawkins, otherwise known as Skinny the Tramp, indicted for murder of Hermit of Turkey Hollow twenty-seventh last May. Our resources limited to two hundred and fifty dollars cash. Trial takes place next week. Kindly advise whether you will accept retainer.

“Silas Higley,

“Grand Supreme Scribe, Sacred Camels of King Menelik, Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries.

“Collect.”

“Well,” commented his sprightly partner, the lesser Tutt of the two, “I observe that they prudently sent their invitation at our expense.—You don’t seriously consider bothering with any legal junk like that?”

Mr. Tutt paused in applying a match to the rat-tailed stogy which drooped from his wrinkled lips.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a farm!” declared he. “A country murder trial?—Why, it’ll be a regular vacation for me!”

“There be no money in it!” growled his junior partner. “And it’ll take you a week.”

“Who asks money,” demanded Mr. Tutt, striking an heroic attitude, “when innocence calls for succor? Could any true-hearted member of the bar—if he had a trace of romance in his soul—refuse to defend a prisoner known by ‘form and style’ as ‘Skinny the Tramp,’ especially if he be charged with murdering a hermit, and still more particularly if requested to do so by the Order of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik, whose invitation is a command? What, may I ask, are hermits for—but to be murdered?”

“You’re incorrigible!” sighed Tutt. “I suppose the whole office will be depleted.”

“No—I’ll try the case alone!” replied his senior, “I’ll merely send Bonnie Doon up there to look around a little and hear what my client has to say for himself, and then I’ll go up a couple of days before and examine the witnesses personally—I’ll have the time of my life.”

“Yes! And incidentally you’ll waste a week or ten days and end by paying all the expenses of the trial yourself.—I know you!”

“Well, what else have I got to spend my money on?” retorted Mr. Tutt. “I might as well spend it on keeping an innocent tramp out of the electric chair as anything else!”

Now, as Tutt, the lesser, knew that Tutt, the greater, would eventually do exactly as he chose, the argument then and there died; and the up-to-date Mr. Bonwright Doon, that extraordinary combination of law clerk, ambulance-chaser, detective and man-about-town who had attached himself to the firm was at once despatched to Pottsville, as Mr. Tutt’s avant courier, where he in due course interviewed Skinny the Tramp in the calaboose, gave Squire Mason the “once-over,” fraternized with Sheriff Higgins and his fat-boy deputy, Mr. Sam Bellows, attended a Lodge Meeting of the Sacred Camels of which—as well as of many similar organizations—he was a member, and after spending but one night under the hospitable roof of the Phoenix House won the lasting loyalty and friendship of “Ma” Barrows and of her daughter Betty, aged nine, whose capacity for peanuts, popcorn, ice-cream cones and bananas he demonstrated by actual test at Syracuse to be equal to that of Ringling Bros.’ baby elephant.

Then, having spied out the lay of the land, he returned weighted with information and wisdom, to make his report to Mr. Tutt,—a report by no means rose-colored and yet not without hope.

“That town is certainly some hick!” declared the cosmopolitan Mr. Doon a week later in making his official return. “It’s the variety of metropolis where they regard an imported cigar as an immorality and where the height of dissipation is an evening at a Custard Pie Comedy with Fatty Arbuckle as custardee. It contained no male citizen in Class 1-A, B or C under the recent draft, but it numbers among its midst forty-one sacred camels—of which, you may recall, I am one.”

“H’m!” murmured Mr. Tutt, making a mental note.

“Yes!” agreed Bonnie, reading his mind. “Moreover, nothing of moment has happened there since Artemas Ward gave his celebrated lecture on ‘Fools’ in the P. of H. hall in 1883. Hence this assassination has naturally excited a heap big local pride. When this tramp-hermit case comes to the bar there’s going to be such a Roman holiday as the Mohawk Valley never saw. The rubes are all coming from miles around, bringing the entire family with ’em and sufficient cold vittles to last a week, and there’ll be overflow meetings all the way to Utica.”

“No doubt! No doubt!” mused his employer. “But what of my opponents? What of the dramatis personæ of the contest? And—what of my client?”

“Your client is a childish nut,” responded Mr. Doon, “who devotes his life to trying to find the pots of kale at the twin bases of the rainbow’s arc. From my casual observation I should infer that he was a trifle less harmless than a cottontail. He naturally asserts he didn’t do it, and of course maybe he didn’t; but by heck! they’re going to come awful close to proving it on him.”

“What’s the evidence?” inquired Mr. Tutt, leaning back in his swivel chair and crossing his Congress shoes on Parker’s New York Criminal Code which lay open at “Murder” upon his desk.

“All you want,” answered Bonnie cheerfully. “Defendant observed going towards hermit’s hut a few minutes before the murder, tries to avoid notice, cry and shot heard, witness bolts to cabin which he reaches in three minutes and finds hermit dying with gold piece in his hand and a broken bean-pot on floor beside him, defendant’s pipe left on table, pursues murderer through woods in general direction of village but can’t overtake him. Defendant walks into grocery store where all the boobs are assembled waiting for the weekly shave—at four o’clock—breathless, excited, blood on his hands—pursuing witness arrives—also breathless—at four-fifteen and gives the alarm. Defendant is arrested but when accused refuses to make any statement; and, if that’s not enough,—his pockets turn out to be full of gold pieces of the same vintage as the one in the hermit’s hand, and his shoes fit the marks in the potato patch.—Q.E.D.”

“Did you say this is going to be a trial?” queried Mr. Tutt. “I should say it was more likely to be an execution.”

“So would I,” assented Bonnie, except for a few minor details. “In the first place the defendant is a harmless dreamer,—half-feckless fool, half ‘boob,’ half philosopher and half——” he paused.

“Well?” commented his employer. “Half—what?”

Bonnie still hesitated rather sheepishly.

“Half-gentleman,” he declared in a slightly defiant tone.

Mr. Tutt smiled approvingly.

“Do they know it?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!” answered Bonnie. “But everybody likes a drink of blood occasionally!”

“What are your other minor details?”

“The prosecutor is a crook—and I’ve got the goods on him.”

“What kind?” asked Mr. Tutt more cheerfully.

“Fifty-seven varieties!” affirmed the ambulance-chaser. “He sticks the boobs for eighteen per cent on his loans, he sneaks up to Utica once in three weeks by himself and gets hard boiled, and he looks like the family portrait of Uncle Jonas Hardscrabble. Besides, although I don’t know why I think so, I have a feeling he’s got some particular personal animosity against our client.”

“H’h!” mused Mr. Tutt. “How about the sheriff?”

Bonnie grinned, as with meticulous elegance he removed a cigarette from a golden case bearing his initials set in diamonds.

“He’s playing the constable in a b’gosh drama up on Broadway. Better drop in and look him over. And he’s got a posse like the fire hose company in Old Jed Prouty!”

Mr. Tutt shook his head regretfully.

“I don’t like your setting. The whole country will be hell-bent-for-conviction on general principles. They’ll want to vindicate their reputation for law and order and—if they’re in doubt—instead of acquitting they’ll return a verdict of murder in the second and rely on executive clemency to remedy any possible injustice! I know ’em!”

“Mr. Tutt,” replied Bonnie with intense seriousness. “They’re going to give you the fight of your life!”

Mr. Tutt fumbled in the coffin-like box on his desk for a stogy.

“I surmised as much!” he muttered. “I surmised as much. But—you never can tell!”

He lit the stogy meditatively and gazed out of the office window through half-lowered lids.

“You say the prisoner entered the drug store at four o’clock exactly?”

“Yes—that’s absolutely fixed.”

“And his pursuer at fifteen minutes past?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Tutt pursed his lips.

“How far did they have to run?”

“About a mile.”

The old lawyer made a rapid calculation.

“And what time was the murder committed?” he asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” replied the clerk. “I had no way to find out.”

“Well,” said Mr. Tutt, bringing his feet to the floor with a bang. “That’s what we’ve got to find out. The whole case turns on it. If our client fired the shot that killed the hermit and it took the witness three minutes to reach the shanty and—say—a couple of minutes more to look around there—then the defendant must have increased his five minute start to fifteen minutes in a single mile—and if the other man was running hard I don’t believe he could have done it! No, sir!—He’s not guilty!”

“And then—there’s the Sacred Camels of King Menelik!” mused Bonnie. “And the sheriff is head camel!”

II

When Lawyer Ephraim Tutt arrived in Pottsville to conduct the defense of Skinny the Tramp for the murder of the Hermit of Turkey Hollow, having been retained to that end by the local order of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik, he found the whole town up and waiting for him. Having with his customary equanimity deposited his bag at the Phoenix House and eaten his dinner, he strolled into the kitchen and, as was his wont, endeavored to gain some knowledge of local color, politics and personalities, including that of the client for whose life he was responsible, by engaging genial “Ma” Best, the proprietress, in conversation.

“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Tutt!” she assured him after she had wiped her hands upon her apron and invited him to a seat in the broken-down rocker beside the wood box, “there ain’t no gentler, kinder soul than Skinny in the whole county! I’ve known him all his life and his ma afore him. He’s just a pore, harmless critter that wouldn’t hurt a fly. Many’s the time I’ve seen him put a baby bird back into the nest that had fallen out. O’ course he’s kind o’ weak in the upper story—but he ain’t crazy by a long shock, an’ there’s some things he knows a lot more about ’n most folks.”

“Will you testify as a witness to his good reputation?” asked Mr. Tutt.

“Indeed I will!” she declared warmly. “And so’ll half the people in Pottsville—the children, anyways! Now what would you like for your supper?—Griddle cakes?”

* * * * * *

Those of our readers who have journeyed from London down to Epsom on race day may be able to form some notion of the condition of affairs in the environs of Pottsville upon the opening morning of the trial of Skinny the Tramp. Long before the light of the stars had paled before the coming dawn—e’en before the glowworm had bid the matin to be near—lanterns flickered in the doorways of distant barns and bobbed down country roads beneath the bouncing axles of antique buggies and carry-alls bearing the sleepless inhabitants of the Mohawk Valley to the legal colosseum of Somerset County. By sunrise Main Street was one long line of flivvers, while the race track recently occupied by the Zingara Gipsies was crowded with every variety of antediluvian vehicle of locomotion,—parked axle to axle.

When at eight o’clock Sheriff Higgins unlocked the door of the court house the stampede which followed filled every bench in less than thirty seconds. Competition for the pleasurable and exciting privilege of sitting upon the jury was keen and the box having been quickly filled by eleven o’clock, old Judge Tompkins was able to direct the prosecutor to open his case.

“Silence in the court room!” cautioned the sheriff pompously. “Silence in the court!—All them folks as wants to go out—git out now—or set still!”

This invitation being disingenuous and not meant to be taken seriously since obviously nobody wished to withdraw,—there being, on the contrary, by actual count three hundred and sixty-one persons packed against the outside of the door who were anxious to get in,—everybody accordingly sat still,—except for that slow, uniform, rhythmical facial movement which now characterizes the entire American nation while viewing any spectacle. Sheriff Higgins thereupon sat down heavily himself, by so doing seeming coincidently to elevate Squire Mason, as upon the other end of the seesaw of public attention. The trial was on in earnest,—the biggest event in the Mohawk since Abe Lincoln showed himself on the back platform of his train when he came through on his way to Washington in 1861. Some of the old codgers who had seen him then—as little boys—were even sitting in the court room now,—and more than one commented on the striking resemblance between him and Lawyer Tutt.

And now Squire Mason, in a new, light blue, broadcloth suit, bowed to Judge Tompkins, wiped his massive forehead with a parti-colored handkerchief, took an ostentatious sip from the discolored glass of water upon the deal table in front of him, replaced it carefully, shot a defiant and contemptuous glance in the direction where Skinny the Tramp sat with Mr. Tutt, cleared his throat, and having thus, by convolutions only somewhat less complicated than those of a Bush League pitcher but serving much the same purpose, given due notice that he was about to deliver the ball and that everybody had better look,—Squire Mason, we say, began his great opening address to the gentlemen-farmers of the jury who had in their keeping the life of Skinny the Tramp.

Having first outlined the entire history of the law of homicide beginning with the well-known Cain-Abel murder in 4000 B.C. he proceeded, by vocal stages of approximately twenty parasangs each, through the pages of Holy Writ, not excluding the Apochrypha,—and referring specifically to both the Judith-Holofernes and the Jael-Sisera cases,—touched briefly upon the lex talionis, the Salic law, and the development of the ecclesiastical courts,—and finally burst into the full flower of rhetoric along with the abolition of benefit of clergy in 1825. As a symposium of miscellaneous penological information it was something very fine indeed,—although it had nothing to do with Skinny the Tramp or the Hermit of Turkey Hollow,—and the jury, hardened by generations of country sermons—not only accepted it as their due but drank it all in with rapturous delight. And at length—as befitted its importance both to the jury and to him—the Squire came to the matter in hand and that is where this story really only begins,—the story of the fight for a human life.

Some time on the afternoon of Saturday, May twenty-seventh last, declared the Squire, an innocent, helpless old recluse was shot to death in his shanty in Turkey Hollow. Obviously robbery had been the motive, since the dead man still clutched in his hand a piece of gold and upon the floor lay a shattered earthen receptacle which had doubtless contained others. There were only two persons known to be anywhere in the neighborhood at the time, James Hawkins, alias Skinny the Tramp,—the prisoner at the bar,—and Emerson, the lumberman who had been cutting pea sticks in the Hollow, who had heard the shot and had hurried at once to the scene of the murder and later given the alarm. The squire here paused for increased emphasis.

However, he remarked, the murderer, like most murderers fortunately, had not made his escape without leaving the evidences of his identity behind him. Not only had he left his pipe, but fresh in the rich earth of the hermit’s potato patch were the prints of a heavy pair of boots, the soles of which were thickly studded with nails. He would in due course exhibit to them an enlarged photograph of said footprints taken on the very afternoon of the crime by Mr. Pennypacker, who ran the gallery over to Somerset Corners. Again he paused significantly, and looked at Skinny the Tramp.

Who, he asked, had worn those fatal boots? Whose guilty feet had left those telltale prints? The same person, he answered dramatically, who at four o’clock had stumbled, disheveled, out of breath and blood-stained, into Colson’s Grocery and called for a bottle of root beer that Saturday afternoon—and in whose pockets had been discovered the balance of the gold pieces representing the hermit’s hoard—the defendant!

A murmur in which were blended astonishment, horror and admiration arose from the crowded benches, showing that for the first time the audience realized the gravity of what was going on,—that not only an innocent man had been killed but that there was sitting within reach of their fingers the man who had killed him and whom the law now sought to kill in return. Beneath the table Mr. Tutt patted the knee of Skinny the Tramp, indicating a confidence which he by no means felt.

Then the prosecutor proceeded to drive a few more nails in Skinny’s coffin. When the defendant had been arrested, he informed the jury, the latter declined to make any statement, either of explanation or of denial, in his own behalf. He had simply stood mute, giving by his trembling limbs, his averted eyes and the chalk-like color of his face, every evidence of a guilty conscience. Then Mason told the jury with an air of melancholy how he hated to be compelled to prosecute any human being for a crime—much more for a murder—but that it was his solemn, sworn duty to do so, just as it would be theirs under the circumstances to convict; and—called Charlie Emerson to the witness chair.

If, at this point, the reader should begin to speculate as to what, if any, is the underlying purpose of this story, let us hasten to state that its object is to demonstrate that sometimes the trial of an action in court under our rules of evidence is less a search for the truth than it is a game of legal chess.

There are two lessons to be drawn from the case of Skinny the Tramp. The first is, that the trial-lawyer, like the general, must be ready instantly to change his tactics to meet new situations as they arise, and that the prosecutor or attorney for the defense who goes into court with a hidebound theory as to his case is apt to leave his own hide behind him neatly hammered to the court room wall. He should realize that the whole actual truth concerning any human happening is never known, being never learned in court because the witnesses, well-meaning though they be, are human,—fallible as to observation, memory and the power to express their recollection of what they think they originally saw and heard. In a word, the real or absolute truth is never the legal truth, and as what the legal truth under the technical rules of procedure is going to turn out to be can rarely be foreseen it is usually idle to speculate much about it. Therefore, he should go boldly into court, listen calmly while the witnesses on both sides tell their widely divergent stories, and then—and not until then—devise the theory upon which he may excusably demand judgment for his client or the acquittal of the prisoner. This requires, to be sure, self-control, ingenuity and audacity; the restraint of a Foch awaiting the precise moment to counter-attack; the self-trust which the philosopher Emerson says is the essence of heroism.

But Mr. Tutt knew well that the expected never occurs,—except when the expected is the unexpected. Thus he always went into a trial with an entirely open mind,—committed to no hypothesis,—and ready to go to the mat in a catch-as-catch-can on law or fact, or—to run like a jack-rabbit. The unknown quantity was both what he dreaded and also what he gambled on. He was an opportunist of opportunists, on the alert to snatch victory out of defeat, making shining virtues out of adroitly concealed necessities, scrambling to his feet with a benign smile just as he was about to be counted out. The only generality to which he subscribed was, “You never can tell!” In a word, Mr. Tutt had a high confidence in his own star, and as he never acknowledged defeat, nobody ever knew when he was beaten, an adverse verdict being to him only the starting point for a renewal of the battle in which he had, at least, an even chance of outwitting his antagonist. He held that the best preparation for a day in court was a sound sleep the night before, an hour’s exercise, and a hearty breakfast followed by what he called a Wheeling Corona-Corona. But not all of us have the equipoise of Ephraim Tutt.

Now, the other lesson to be deduced from the trial of Skinny the Tramp was that the best rule in examining witnesses is to have no rule at all,—which is very much the same thing as “You never can tell!” There is no more any hard and fast rule for the examination of a witness than there is for arguing with your stepmother. It “all depends.” The lawyer who says that you must never let a witness leave the stand without exhausting his information is just as wide of the mark as he who claims that the only safe cross-examination is no cross-examination and that the best cross-examiner is he who does not cross-examine at all. Yet “no generality is true,—not even this one,” as the French say; the fact of the matter being that cross-examination is obviously a dangerous weapon, usually resulting in more harm than good—but not always, and that every witness presents a new and special problem which can only be solved by a subtle and perhaps instinctive appreciation of his psychology. Generally speaking, it is a pretty safe plan to ask no questions of a witness who has not harmed your side of the case, for if you cross-examine you may bring out something entirely unexpected to your great and everlasting detriment. “Leave well enough alone.” That is the path of prudence—and yet—not always! But let us not anticipate.

Emerson, the lumberman, like many another man of limited education, in addition to an astonishingly accurate memory for detail, showed himself to have a gift for picturesque description which made him a graphic and convincing witness for the prosecution. He was obviously unbiased, absolutely clear, positive in all his statements, and careful,—as both the judge and the prosecutor took pains to instruct him to be,—to answer only the exact questions put to him.

This, of course, is the regular and proper rule, for if a witness is permitted to volunteer testimony he is almost certain to violate every rule of evidence within the first thirty seconds. But in the case of Emerson there was a particular and vital reason for such a caution on the part of the prosecutor which was known only to him, namely, that for tactical reasons it was imperative that certain features of his testimony should be suppressed.

Now it is the general rule of the law that the lawyer who calls a witness to the stand in the first place vouches for his integrity and, in the second, commits himself and his case to the truth of the proposition of fact that the witness is called to substantiate. But there is a qualification upon this rule, which is that technically the lawyer is bound by his own witness only upon those subjects upon which he sees fit to examine him; and, if later, his adversary brings out from the same witness new facts upon other subjects, the lawyer who originally called him may attack the witness as hostile, discredit him as to those facts, and controvert them if he can.

Yet, underlying all rules is the universal principle of sound ethics and common decency which hold true both in law and in life as a whole, that we must conduct ourselves at all times and places as gentlemen and sportsmen, whether in court or outdoors, until we join the choir invisible and have no longer any moral problems. In other words, the lawyer has got to play his game fairly and if, on the one hand, he calls a witness to prove a certain fact knowing that the witness is mistaken, or, on the other hand, knowing that his witness is telling the truth about a certain fact induces the jury or the judge to believe that the witness is mistaken, that man is a liar, a cad and a shyster and ought to be disbarred.

Now, Squire Mason was up against a most unfortunate, tantalizing and exasperating situation with regard to this, his principal witness, which was that although Emerson had taken only a few minutes to reach the hermit’s shanty after hearing the fatal shot, and had lingered there but a minute or two more and had then hurried hot foot to Pottsville, arriving there within fifteen minutes of the time Skinny also reached town, which is to say, considering that the murderer had at least a five minute start, almost at his heels,—nevertheless, and this is the crux of the case, he was prepared to state definitely and unequivocally, if asked the time at which he found the hermit dying, that it was four o’clock exactly—which as we know, and Squire Mason also perfectly well knew, was the precise moment at which the tramp entered Colson’s grocery store a full mile away. If this were true, then James Hawkins, no matter how strongly circumstances pointed towards him as the murderer, could not be guilty.

Thus, if District Attorney Mason should elicit “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” from Emerson,—which was what he was in duty bound to do and what Emerson had sworn to tell,—the prosecution would establish a perfect alibi for the defendant from the lips of its own chief witness. Therefore Mason had resolved to refrain from asking the lumberman any question bearing upon the time of the homicide, and in order that no one else might suspect what Emerson might be able, if questioned, to say upon this important topic, had slipped him twenty-five dollars and instructed him that the interests of the public—particularly that of the Mohawk Valley—demanded that he should absent himself from his customary haunts until he should be needed at the trial.

Of all this, naturally, Mr. Tutt was wholly ignorant and he had come to Pottsville with no other defense than the rather shaky argument that Skinny could not have fired the shot that killed the hermit and, with only a five minute start, have increased his lead over the pursuing Emerson to fifteen whole minutes in a single mile. It had, according to his theory, taken the lumberman only three minutes to reach the shanty after hearing the shot, and he was out of the place again and hot on the murderer’s trail in two minutes more. That meant that he was only five minutes behind when he started in pursuit. Now, as Mr. Tutt was going to claim, a man could run a mile in less than ten minutes, and hence it was manifestly impossible that Skinny could have reached Pottsville fifteen minutes ahead of Emerson—if he were guilty.

This plausible—but distinctly Tuttian—argument depended, however, entirely upon the assumption that Emerson did not take more than three minutes to get to the shanty after hearing the shot, did not stay in its vicinity for more than a couple more, and had run at top speed—without pause—all the way to Pottsville,—assumptions that had little to sustain them, and had small appeal compared with the overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence that pointed to the tramp as the murderer. Mr. Tutt realized full well that his defense was a flimsy one, since in all probability Emerson had been fully fifteen minutes behind the fleeing assassin when he had started for the town and at best had probably done no more than hold his distance, if indeed he had succeeded in doing that. Yet, although so far as Mr. Tutt was aware, this ephemeral syllogism was all that stood between his client and the electric chair, nevertheless, and had he only known it,—according to Emerson’s full story related privately to Mason,—Skinny had an iron-clad, copper-fastened, dyed-in-the-wool, unimpeachable and perfect alibi. It was this full story—the “whole truth”—that Mason now set himself to conceal in the hope that it would never be known, for as long as the exact time of the murder could be left vague and undetermined the alibi would be valueless. So the shifty Squire carefully omitted to ask the lumberman any question as to the hour except when it was that he had started in to cut his pea sticks,—which had been two o’clock.

“There had been a smart shower,” said he, “and some thunder—but the sun had come out real bright agin. I was about three hundred yards from where the hermit lived—most through with my job—I’d cut a hundred sticks and I only wanted a hundred and a half—when I heard a holler from the direction of the house follered by a shot.”

“Yes.—Go on!” directed Squire Mason ominously.

“I run over there as fast as I could. The door was open. I called out but got no answer, so I went in. The shanty was hot—for the winders were closed—and it was sort o’ dim in there—and then I hearn a kind of cluckin’ sound and I see the hermit lyin’ on the floor—he had toppled over on his back—and the blood was frothin’ out of his mouth where he was tryin’ to breathe.”

“Proceed,” said the court. “What else did you observe?”

“I stepped over to where he was lyin’ an’ lifted up his head so’s to look in his face. I remember there was a great big moth flappin’ like mad inside the window. It skeart me. Then all of a sudden the hermit stopped breathin’—the moth flew out the door—and I knew he was dead—murdered.”

“Do you object to the word ‘murdered,’ Mr. Tutt?” inquired the court.

“No, your Honor,” replied the old lawyer. “The poor man was undoubtedly murdered.”

“Very well, go on,” continued Judge Tompkins to the witness.

“I threw somethin’ over him and looked ’round for a second or two. There was a busted bean pot lyin’ under the table and I noticed the hermit had a gold piece clutched in his fist. The rest of the shanty looked same as usual.—So I ran right out and listened. I could hear some one crashing through the brush and I followed after towards the town, but he beat me to it.”

The court room was as still as the hermit’s death chamber.

“Did you see any footprints in the garden patch?” asked Squire Mason.

“I did. Sure. An’ I showed ’em both to the sheriff and to Mr. Pennypacker, the photographer.”

“When you went back there with Sheriff Higgins and Mr. Pennypacker was everything in and around the shanty the same as when you were there the first time?” asked Mason.

“Just the same. No one else had been there,” declared Emerson.

“That is all!” announced the prosecutor in a tone of triumph. “You may cross-examine, Mr. Tutt.”

Mr. Tutt did not immediately arise to his feet. It was of course obvious to him that Mason had refrained from eliciting the time of the murder from Emerson. Time and place were the inevitable bases of all testimony. Why had he done so? It was conceivable that the witness was entirely at sea about the time and hence that his evidence regarding it, if given, would have been of no value. That was more than probable, in which case it was natural enough that the district attorney should not have gone into the matter at all. But there was also—Mr. Tutt recognized—another possibility, so remote as to be almost theoretical,—that Emerson did know the time at which he entered the shanty and that Mason was deliberately holding it back. If this were so he was doing it for a reason and what reason could there be?

Mr. Tutt was face to face with one of the greatest dilemmas of his life: if Emerson knew the time of the shot and it was such as to give Skinny time to have fired it and reach the village by four o’clock, that fact, if he brought it out, would be of inestimable damage to him,—but, if by any chance—oh, could it be!—that the shot was fired so close to four as to make it unlikely or impossible that Skinny could have fired it and yet arrive at Colson’s at four, the answer might acquit him! “The Lady or the Tiger”! Which was it? Mr. Tutt thought hard. Was Mason concealing the time, or was he luring his adversary into a trap? For, if Mr. Tutt himself adduced the fact that the murder occurred, say, at a quarter to four his client would be doubly damned. A bit of supposedly unexpected evidence elicited on cross-examination by a party to whom it is harmful is invariably more damaging than if brought out by the party who has called the witness in the first place. On the one hand it was a great temptation for Mr. Tutt to waive the witness from the stand with a nonchalant, “No questions!” as if his testimony contained nothing damaging to the defense; but on the other it might be his last chance of proving even the approximate time of the murder. Sly old dog that he was, he resolved to try to steal whatever advantage might lie in both courses. So, without getting up, he waved his hand towards the window and remarked in the most casual manner possible:

“No questions.—Thank you, Mr. Emerson, for your very vivid word picture!” And he busied himself with his papers.

Then, as the witness was about to descend from the platform, he looked up hastily and said in a tone of apology:

“I beg your pardon. I forget whether you happened to mention the hour at which you visited the shanty the first time.”

Emerson smiled. Without taking his seat he answered:

“No, I didn’t mention it.”

“Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“What time was it?”

Emerson turned to the jury who were leaning forward expectantly.

“When I lifted the hermit’s head in my hand I was lookin’ straight into the face of that old clock of his that stands between the two windows in the back—and it was just four o’clock.”

“Thanks,” remarked Mr. Tutt quietly, as if the reply held no particular significance for his client, whom in fact it might well save. “No other questions.”

The judge glanced at Squire Mason.

“Have you anything further, Mr. District Attorney?”

“No—I have no further questions,” replied the prosecutor, also as if the matter was not of the slightest moment.

“May I go, your honor?” asked Emerson.

“Yes,—if these gentlemen are through with you,” smiled Judge Tompkins.

As neither of the gentlemen wished or dared to ask him the fraction of another question Mr. Emerson forthwith was given leave to depart upon his business,—which unbeknown to any of them was to take a job as foreman in a steam lumber mill seventy miles distant, the train for which bore him thither later that afternoon.

Mr. Tutt settled back in his chair, a heavenly calm descending upon his previously agonized spirit. Skinny had been snatched from the very jaws of death. There was nothing to worry about any longer. Skinny the Tramp couldn’t have been in two places at once, no matter how strong the evidence against him might be.

Evidently the Squire was a good bluffer. It required real nerve to be as placid as all that in the face of such a body blow! The prosecutor took a sip of water, pushed a mass of papers away from him, leaned over and picked up a large diagram of the clearing, including the hermit’s shanty drawn to scale. It had been artistically done and contained no objectionable matter, the location of the body not having been marked at all, and the various pieces of furniture appearing only in outline. Next to the cot-bed the most conspicuous object in the place had plainly been the hermit’s clock.

Squire Mason handed the diagram to Mr. Tutt with stately bucolic courtesy.

“Any objection to my puttin’ in this here diagram?” he inquired.

Mr. Tutt smiled as he glanced over it.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!” he replied. Then observing the look of bewilderment upon the prosecutor’s face, he added: “None whatever! It can be admitted so far as I am concerned, subject, of course, to correction. Who made it?”

“Miss Gookin,” replied Mason.

“Then I heartily congratulate Miss Gookin on her artistic work!” said Mr. Tutt, thus making sure of at least one vote, if ever he should run for governor, from “Toggery Bill,” her father, and gaining high favor with Mr. Soper, juror Number Eight, who was seeking the lady’s hand in marriage.

“All right, then—mark it!” said Hezekiah to the stenographer. “Now, sheriff! Take the stand!”

Just as the prosecution of Skinny the Tramp marked the peak of Squire Mason’s professional career, so his appearance as a witness at that same trial was the greatest event in the official experience of Sheriff Higgins. Being a quiet, home-loving citizen, the Supreme Exalted Ruler of the Sacred Camels had experienced few of the joys of publicity and now to be able to ascend the rostrum and, with a real reporter sent over special from Utiky taking down every word that fell from his lips, to recount the thrilling narrative of how he had captured Skinny the Tramp and later secured the evidence against him through a personal visit to the scene of the homicide while the body was still warm, to sit elevated high in the court room upon a level with the judge himself, to feel in his own opinion that he was the most important figure among the dramatis personæ, and that the eyes and ears of all waited upon him—ah! who that has not had a similar experience can have the faintest realization of its ecstasy?

Now Sheriff Higgins had looked forward to his coming testimony with great satisfaction, not only for the reasons just stated, but also because it would give him an opportunity to indicate publicly what small potatoes he thought Squire Mason to be. He was in the delightful position of being able at one and the same time to gratify his vanity, to do his full duty to the state and also to savor the full venom of his hatred for an ancient enemy. He proposed to do each in turn and to do it thoroughly and well, but he was in a somewhat delicate and paradoxical situation. He had collected the evidence against Skinny, and was one of the chief witnesses against him; he acknowledged that logically there was no escape from the conclusion that the tramp was the guilty party; he was the mainstay of the law in that county and it was up to him to see that the murderer was convicted; and yet—he didn’t believe Skinny had done it! No, sir! And the reason was simply that the tramp wasn’t that kind of a feller, and he and half a dozen other Sacred Camels were ready—if asked—to say so.

But first, approaching his various phases in order, let us take up the sheriff’s innocent gratification of his own vanity—in which he differed not a whit from ninety-nine out of every hundred witnesses. It is a noticeable thing that once a man finds himself the cynosure of public attention he feels obliged to picture himself as of heroic mould. Has any witness since the Creation—we wonder—in any court of law ever admitted—unless his questioner had the goods on him and he knew it—that he was in any degree stupid, unscrupulous, negligent, timid or even slightly impolite or uncultivated? We have never met one. It cannot be mere boastfulness or vainglory that leads each man, who kisses the Book and gazes upon the carping features of the jury, to try and make them believe him the highest type of citizen. He isn’t and he knows it; and he knows they know he knows it, and yet he will thrust forth his chest and assume for the nonce to possess every virtue in the calendar while modestly protesting that there may be others as good or as brave as he.

We have heard otherwise apparently sensible men confess under oath without trace of embarrassment, one that he was regarded as the handsomest man in Rochester, N.Y., another that he was the greatest mechanical genius in the world, another that he would back his own opinion on any given subject against that of any ten men and stick to it even if proven mathematically to be mistaken, another that he had never told a lie or been guilty of any sort of misleading statement in his life, another that he had never consciously done anything wrong, another that he had read every book worth reading in the English language—and answered categorically “Yes” to some six hundred separate works such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—and one, who may have been telling the truth, that he had never kissed, or been kissed by, a member of the opposite sex.

The sheriff wasn’t as bad as any of these, but now that it was all over, his recollection as to his own conduct and demeanor differed radically from that of his associates at the time. He honestly thought that he had done things which in fact had been done by others. Anyhow, someone had done them, so what difference did it make? While, therefore, the substance of his testimony—as with most witnesses—was based on fact, the details bore no resemblance whatever to the truth. As the reader knows, the barber had received Skinny’s surrender, yet the sheriff unhesitatingly swore that he had reduced him into possession; the proprietor of the Mohawk Palace Theatre had searched the tramp and found the twenty five-dollar gold pieces, yet Higgins managed to give the impression that it was he, and not Mr. Perkins, who had discovered them; as the reader knows, he had been scared out of his seven senses when he visited the hermit’s shanty and had refused to touch the body, and he now was obviously under the firm impression that he had walked boldly in, uncovered the corpse, searched the clothes upon it, inventoried the furniture and in general conducted himself with the brilliant audacity of one of Dumas’ heroes and the astuteness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes; which, to tell the truth nobody would have minded in the slightest degree, least of all Mr. Tutt, for the slab-sided old sheriff was a good old scout, a deacon in the Baptist congregation, as well as the leading Sacred Camel in that part of the Mohawk—had it not been for what Squire Mason regarded as his deliberate act of treachery in giving Skinny a good character—all of which we will set down in due course. By the time he was called to the stand Mose Higgins was almost of the same mind as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the opera of Robin Hood when he said