y
shaken and in a measure cleansed, he constituted a companion to his
evening pipe. For reading matter was deplorably lacking in
Doppersdorp--the contents of the "public library," so called, consisting
mainly of ancient and heavy novels, soporific and incomplete, or the
biographies of divines, sour of habit and of mind narrow as the "way"
they were supposed to indicate.

Lambert had his reward, for these old records reaching back a decade--
two decades--judiciously scanned, were interesting, undeniably so.
There were representative papers issued in the Australian colonies, in
New Zealand, in India and America, and in no end of lands beside.
Lambert resolved, before accomplishing his projected wholesale
destruction, to scissor out such incidents as were worth preserving, and
to set up a scrap book; the main difficulty about this resolve lying in
the formidable mass of matter from which he felt called upon to select.
But while solving this problem, Lambert was destined to receive a shock,
and one of considerable power and magnitude.

He was seated alone one evening, looking through such an old file. The
paper was an American one, published in some hardly known Western
township. Its contents were racy, outspoken, very; and seemed of the
nature to have been written by the left hand of the editor, while the
right grasped the butt of the ever-ready "gun." But in turning a sheet
of this Lambert suddenly came upon that which made him leap in his
chair, and stare as though his eyes were about to drop from his head to
the floor. This is what he read:--

"The Crime of Stillwell's Flat.
Portrait of the Accused.
Sordid Affair.
He Tomahawks his Partner for the sake of Four Hundred Dollars.
The Man with the Double Scar.
Clever Arrest."

Such were some of the headings in bold capitals, which, distributed down
the column, about summed up the facts of the case, but only cursory
attention did Lambert at first pay to these. Not by them had his eye
been originally attracted, but by the portrait which headed the column.
For this portrait, mere pen-and-ink sketch as it originally had been,
was a most vivid and unmistakable likeness of Roden Musgrave.

Yes, there it was, the same clear-cut features, the same carriage of the
head--the artist seemed not merely to have caught his expression, but
even the characteristics of his very attitude. And--surer, more
convincing than all--the same double scar beneath the lower li