Then Orlando explained. "It's not what you think," he said. Then he told
the story--such as there was to tell--of what had happened during the
last few moments.

Scarsdale climbed up into the wagon, struck a light, looked at the body
of Mazarine, at his face, and then lifted up the beard and examined the
neck. There were finger-marks in the flesh.

"So, that's it," he said. "Strangled! He seems to have took it easy,
sittin' there like that," he added as he climbed down.

"I don't understand it," remarked Orlando. "As you say, it's weird, his
sitting there like that with the reins in his hands. I don't understand
it!"

"I saw you getting down from the wagon," remarked Scarsdale meaningly.

"Say, do you really believe--?" began Orlando without agitation, but
with a sudden sense of his own false position.

"It ain't a matter of belief," the other declared. "If there's an
inquest, I've got to tell what I've seen. You know that, don't you?"

"That's all right," replied Orlando. "You've got to tell what you've
seen, and so have I. I guess the truth will out. Come, let's move him on
to Tralee. We'll lay him down in the bottom of the wagon, and I'll lead
his horses with a halter.... No," he added, changing his mind, "you lead
my horses, and I'll drive him home."

A moment afterwards, as the procession made its way to Tralee, Scarsdale
said to himself:

"He must have nerves like iron to drive Mazarine home, if he killed
him. Well, he's got them, and still they call him Giggles as if he was a
silly girl!"

CHAPTER XVII. THE SUPERIOR MAN

Students of life have noticed constantly that moral distinctions are
not matters of principle but of certain peremptory rules found on nice
calculations of the social mind. In the field of crime, responsibility
is most often calculated, not upon the crime itself, but upon how the
thing is done.

In Askatoon, no one would have been greatly shocked if, when Orlando
Guise and Joel Mazarine met at the railway-station or in the main
street, Orlando had killed Mazarine.

Mazarine would have been dead in either case; and he would have been
killed by another hand in either case; but the attitude of the public
would not have been the same in either case. The public would have
considered the killing of Mazarine before the eyes of the world as
justifiable homicide; its dislike of the man would have induced it to
add the word justifiable.

But that Joel Mazarine should be killed by