ng's potations being the figure he
recalled of his pretty hostess, with bare arms and lifted glasses,
imitating the barkeeper. A complacent smile straightened his yellow
mustache. How she kept glancing at him and watching him, the little
witch! Ha! no wonder! What could she find in the surly, slinking, stupid
brute yonder? (The gentleman here alluded to was his host.) But the
deputy had not been without a certain provincial success with the fair.
He was true to most men, and fearless to all. One may not be too hard
upon him at this moment of his life.

For as he was passing the house he stopped suddenly. Above the dry,
dusty, herbal odors of the plain, above the scent of the new-mown hay
within the barn, there was distinctly another fragrance,--the smell of
a pipe. But where? Was it his host who had risen to take the outer air?
Then it suddenly flashed upon him that Beasley did NOT smoke, nor
the constable either. The smell seemed to come from the barn. Had he
followed out the train of ideas thus awakened, all might have been well;
but at this moment his attention was arrested by a far more exciting
incident to him,--the draped and hooded figure of Mrs. Beasley was just
emerging from the house. He halted instantly in the shadow, and held
his breath as she glided quickly across the intervening space and
disappeared in the half-opened door of the barn. Did she know he
was there? A keen thrill passed over him; his mouth broadened into a
breathless smile. It was his last! for, as he glided forward to the
door, the starry heavens broke into a thousand brilliant fragments
around him, the earth gave way beneath his feet, and he fell forward
with half his skull shot away.

Where he fell there he lay without an outcry, with only one
movement,--the curved and grasping fingers of the fighter's hand towards
his guarded hip. Where he fell there he lay dead, his face downwards,
his good right arm still curved around across his back. Nothing of him
moved but his blood,--broadening slowly round him in vivid color, and
then sluggishly thickening and darkening until it stopped too, and sank
into the earth, a dull brown stain. For an instant the stillness of
death followed the echoless report, then there was a quick and feverish
rustling within the barn, the hurried opening of a window in the loft,
scurrying footsteps, another interval of silence, and then out of the
farther darkness the sounds of horse-hoofs in the muffled dust of the