with
rain pouring down the slant of its clapboards and splashing from its
eaves; the groups of horses hitched to the scraggy apple-trees of the
deserted homestead; and here and there the white canvas cover of an
ox-wagon, with its yoke of steers standing with low-hung heads in the
downpour. The pallid circling mists enveloped the world, and limited
the outlook to a periphery of scant fifty paces; occasionally becoming
tenuous, as if to suggest the dark looming of the mountain across the
narrow valley, and the precipice close at hand behind the building,
then once more intervening, white and dense of texture, forming a
background which imparted a singular distinctness to the figures
grouped in the open space of the barn beneath the shadowy loft.

The greater number of the gathering had been summoned hither by a
sheer curiosity as coercive as a subpoena, but sundry of the group
were witnesses, reluctant, anxious, with a vague terror of the law,
and an ignorant sense of an impending implication that set both craft
and veracity at defiance. They held their heads down ponderingly, as
they stood; perhaps rehearsing mentally the details of their meagre
knowledge of the event, or perhaps canvassing the aspect of certain
points which might impute to them blame or arouse suspicion, and
endeavoring to compass shifty evasions, to transform or suppress them
in their forthcoming testimony. At random, one might have
differentiated the witnesses from the mass of the ordinary mountaineer
type by the absorbed eye, or the meditative moving lip unconsciously
forming unspoken words, or the fallen dismayed jaw as of the victim of
circumstantial evidence. It was a strange chance, the death that had
met this casual wayfarer at their very doors, and one might not know
how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect
added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a
mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his
more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the
little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough
to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness under examination; and
yet so great was the sound of the rain outside and the stir of the
assemblage that little or naught was overheard without.

Now and again the waiting witnesses looked with doubt and curiosity
and suspicion at a new-comer, with an obvious disposition to hope and
believe that