and two brown geese, stuffed with apples, were put down sizzling before
Antonia. She began to carve, and Rudolph, who sat next his mother,
started the plates on their way. When everybody was served, he looked
across the table at me.

'Have you been to Black Hawk lately, Mr. Burden? Then I wonder if you've
heard about the Cutters?'

No, I had heard nothing at all about them.

'Then you must tell him, son, though it's a terrible thing to talk about
at supper. Now, all you children be quiet, Rudolph is going to tell
about the murder.'

'Hurrah! The murder!' the children murmured, looking pleased and
interested.

Rudolph told his story in great detail, with occasional promptings from
his mother or father.

Wick Cutter and his wife had gone on living in the house that Antonia
and I knew so well, and in the way we knew so well. They grew to be
very old people. He shrivelled up, Antonia said, until he looked like
a little old yellow monkey, for his beard and his fringe of hair never
changed colour. Mrs. Cutter remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had
known her, but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking
palsy which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her
hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure china, poor
woman! As the couple grew older, they quarrelled more and more often
about the ultimate disposition of their 'property.' A new law was passed
in the state, securing the surviving wife a third of her husband's
estate under all conditions. Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs.
Cutter would live longer than he, and that eventually her 'people,' whom
he had always hated so violently, would inherit. Their quarrels on this
subject passed the boundary of the close-growing cedars, and were heard
in the street by whoever wished to loiter and listen.

One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and
bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that
he 'thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about
it.' (Here the children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered
giggles.)

Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practised
for an hour or so, and then went home. At six o'clock that evening, when
several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to supper,
they heard a pistol shot. They paused and were looking doubtfully at
one another, when another shot came crashing through an upsta