e was spun about so that he faced the opposite direction from the one
in which he had been travelling, and went down upon his hands and knees,
almost touching with his head a big licheny boulder, half buried in
vines and grass. Glancing back, he saw what had twisted him off his
course and thrown him down--it was an upward-aimed tree-root, stubby and
pointed, which had thrust itself through his right shoe lacing. The low
shoe had been pulled half-way off his foot, and, under the strain, the
silken lace had broken short off.

In the act of raising himself upright, he had straightened to a
half-crouch when, just beyond the big green-masked boulder, he saw that
which held him petrified in his pose. There, in a huddle among the
shrubs, where he would never have seen it except for the chance
shifting-about of his gaze, was the body of a man lying face downward
the head hidden under the upturned skirts of the coat.

He went to it and turned it over. It was the body of the man he
sought--Maxwell--and there was a revolver in Maxwell's right hand and a
hole in Maxwell's right temple, and Maxwell was dead.

Judson Green stood up and waited for the other pursuers. He had won a
hundred-dollar bet and Cassidy had lost a thousand-dollar reward.

CHAPTER III

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

When Judge Priest, on this particular morning, came puffing into his
chambers at the courthouse, looking, with his broad beam and in his
costume of flappy, loose white ducks, a good deal like an old-fashioned
full-rigger with all sails set, his black shadow, Jeff Poindexter, had
already finished the job of putting the quarters to rights for the day.
The cedar water bucket had been properly replenished; the upper flange
of a fifteen-cent chunk of ice protruded above the rim of the bucket;
and alongside, on the appointed nail, hung the gourd dipper that the
master always used. The floor had been swept, except, of course, in the
corners and underneath things; there were evidences, in streaky scrolls
of fine grit particles upon various flat surfaces, that a dusting brush
had been more or less sparingly employed. A spray of trumpet flowers,
plucked from the vine that grew outside the window, had been draped over
the framed steel engraving of President Davis and his Cabinet upon the
wall; and on the top of the big square desk in the middle of the room,
where a small section of cleared green-blotter space formed an oasis in
a dry and arid desert of clutte