like!' says he, savage-like."

McCloskey sprang from his chair and towered over the smaller man.

"One of those men was Bart Rufford: who was the other one, Judson?"

Judson was apparently unmoved. "You're forgettin' that I was plum' fool
drunk, Jim. I didn't see either one of 'em."

"But you heard?"

"Yes, one of 'em was Rufford, as you say, and up to a little bit ago I'd
'a' been ready to swear to the voice of the one you haven't guessed. But
now I can't."

"Why can't you do it now?"

"Sit down and I'll tell you. I've been jarred. Everything I've told you
so far, I can remember, or it seems as if I can, but right where I broke
off a cog slipped. I must 'a' been drunker than I thought I was. Gridley
says he was going by and he says I called him in and told him,
fool-wise, all the things I was going to do to Mr. Lidgerwood. He says
he hushed me up, called me out to the sidewalk, and started me home.
Mac, I don't remember a single wheel-turn of all that, and it makes me
scary about the other part."

McCloskey relapsed into his swing-chair.

"You said you thought you recognized the other man by his voice. It
sounds like a drunken pipe-dream, the whole of it; but who did you think
it was?"

Judson rose up, jerked his thumb toward the door of the superintendent's
business office, and said, "Mac, if the whiskey didn't fake the whole
business for me--the man who was mumblin' with Bart Rufford
was--Hallock!"

"Hallock?" said McCloskey; "and you said there was a woman in it? That
fits down to the ground, John. Mr. Lidgerwood has found out something
about Hallock's family tear-up, or he's likely to find out. That's what
that means!"

What more McCloskey said was said to an otherwise empty room. Judson had
opened the door and closed it, and was gone.

Summing up the astounding thing afterward, those who could recall the
details and piece them together traced Judson thus:

It was ten-forty when he came down from McCloskey's office, and for
perhaps twenty minutes he had been seen lounging at the lunch-counter in
the station end of the Crow's Nest. At about eleven one witness had seen
him striking at the anvil in Hepburn's shop, the town marshal being the
town blacksmith in the intervals of official duty.

Still later, he had apparently forgotten the good resolution declared to
McCloskey, and all Angels saw him staggering up and down Mesa Avenue,
stumbling into and out of the many saloons, and growing, to all
app