ent in part to that, feeling
confident of course that Mr. Singleton was in no ways accountable for
the loss, but----

Mr. James was asked if the nervousness indicated by Mr. Singleton was
a fear of personal consequences following the telegram, but Mr. James
preferred not to say. He had regarded Mr. Singleton as a model of most
of the virtues, and while Singleton's voice and manner had certainly
been unusual, he could not presume to suspect the inner meaning of
it.

The telegraph and telephone records bore out the testimony of Mr.
James.

The fact that the first telegram was addressed to the manager, Mr.
Conrad, had apparently nothing to do with the case, since the
telegraph files showed that messages were about evenly divided in the
matter of address concerning ranch matters. They were often addressed
simply to "Granados Rancho" or "Manager Granados Ranch." This one
simply happened to be addressed to the name of the manager.

The coroner decided that the mode of address had no direct bearing on
the fact that the man was found dead under the cottonwoods with copies
of both telegrams in his pocket, both written in a different hand from
his carefully clear script as shown in his address book. Safe in his
pocket also was money, a gold watch with a small gold compass, and a
handsome seal ring. Nothing was missing, which of course precluded the
thought of murder for robbery, and Philip Singleton was too mildly
negative to make personal enemies, a constitutional neutral.

Billie, looking very small and very quiet, was brought in by Dona Luz
and Mr. Jefferson of the neighboring ranch, fifty miles to the east.
She had not been weeping. She was too stunned for tears, and there was
a strangely ungirlish tension about her, an alert questioning in her
eyes as she looked from face to face, and then returned to the face of
the one man who was a stranger, the kindly sympathetic face of Mr.
Frederick James.

She told of the telegrams she had copied, and of the distress of
Singleton, but that his distress was no more than her own, that she
had been crying about the horses, and he had tried to comfort her. She
did not believe he had a trouble in the world of his own, and he had
never killed himself--never!

When asked if she had any reason to suspect a murderer, she said if
they ever found who killed the horses they would find who killed her
Papa Phil, but this opinion was evidently not shared by any of the
others. The report of