private citizen to throw stones at the street lamps; to
Custer he made dire threats. He'd "toss a scare into them red necks yet!
They'd bust his lamps once too often--he was laying for them! He knowed
pretty well who done it, and when he found out for sure--" He winked at
Custer, leaving it to his son's imagination to determine just what form
his vengeance would take, and Custer, being nothing if not sanguinary,
prayed for bloodshed.

But the thing that pleased the boy best was his father's account of
those meetings with mysterious strangers. How as he approached they
moved off with many a furtive backward glance; how he made as if to
drive away in the opposite direction, and then at the first corner
turned swiftly about and raced down some parallel street in hot pursuit,
to come on them again, to their great and manifest discomfiture.
Circumstantially he described each turn he made, down what streets he
drove Bill at a gallop, up which he walked that trustworthy animal; all
was elaborately worked out. The chase, however, always ended one
way--the strangers disappeared unaccountably, and, search as he might,
he could not find them again, but he and Custer felt certain that his
activity had probably averted some criminal act.

In short, to Mr. Shrimplin and his son the small events of life
magnified themselves, becoming distorted and portentous. A man, emerging
suddenly from an alley in the dusk of the early evening, furnished them
with a theme for infinite speculation and varied conjecture; that nine
times out of ten the man said, "Hello, Shrimp!" and passed on his way
perfectly well known to the little lamplighter was a matter of not the
slightest importance. Sometimes, it is true, Mr. Shrimplin told of the
salutation, but the man was always a stranger to him, and that he should
have spoken, calling him by name, he and Custer agreed only added to the
sinister mystery of the encounter.

It was midday on that twenty-seventh of November when Mr. Shrimplin
killed Murphy of the solitary eye, and he reached the climax of the
story just as Mrs. Shrimplin began to prepare the dressing for the small
turkey that was to be the principal feature of their four-o'clock
dinner. The morning's scanty fall of snow had been so added to as time
passed that now it completely whitened the strip of brown turf in the
little side yard beyond the kitchen windows.

"I think," said Mr. Shrimplin, "we are going to see some weather. Well,
snow