the colonel, smoking his
after-breakfast cigar, sat on the shady porch of The Haven and read:

"O, Sir, doubt not that angling is an art: is it not an art to deceive a
trout with an artificial fly? a trout! that is more sharp-sighted than
any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your
high-mettled merlin is bold; and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two
to-morrow for a friend's breakfast."

"Um," mused the colonel. "Too bad it isn't the trout season. That
passage from Walton just naturally makes me hungry for the speckled
beauties. But I can wait. Meanwhile we'll see what else the stream
holds. Shag, are you coming?"

"Yes, sah! Comm' right d'rectly, sah! Yes, sah, Colonel!" and Shag
shuffled along the porch with the fishing tackle.

And so Colonel Ashley sat and fished, and as he fished he thought, for
the sport was not so good that it took up his whole attention. In
fact he was rather glad that the fish were not rising well, for he had
entered into this golf course mystery with a zest he seldom brought to
any case, and he was anxious to get to the bottom.

"I didn't want to get into that diamond cross affair, but I was dragged
in by the heels," he mused. "And now, just because some years ago
Horace Carwell did me a favor and enabled me to make money in the copper
market, I am trying to find out who killed him, or if, in a fit of
despondency, he killed himself."

"And yet, if it was despondency, he disguised it marvelously well. And
if it was an accident it was a most skillful and fateful one. How he
could swallow poison and not know it is beyond me. And now to consider
who might have given it to him, arguing that it was not an accident."

The colonel had walked up and down the stream at the turn of the
Maraposa golf course, Shag following at a discreet distance, and, after
trying out several places had settled down under a shady tree at an eddy
where the waters, after rushing down the bed of the small river, met
with an obstruction and turned upon themselves. Here they had worn out a
place under an overhanging bank, making a deep pool where, if ever, fish
might he expected to lurk.

And there the colonel threw in his bait and waited.

"And now, that I am waiting," he mused, "let me consider, as my friend
Walton would, matters in their sequence. Horace Carwell is dead. Let us
argue that some one gave him the poison. Who was it?"

And then, like some file index, the colonel began to pas