an his
irreverence for it, and he had been known in Carlow as a customarily
reckless man. They wanted illegal and desperate advice, and quieted down
to hear it. He spoke in his professionally calm voice.

"Gentlemen, it seems to me that Mr. Smith and Mr. Ribshaw" (nodding to
the man with the rawhide whip) "are both right. What good are we doing
here? What we want to know is what's happened to Mr. Harkless. It looks
just now like the shell-men might have done it. Let's find out what they
done. Scatter and hunt for him. 'Soon as anything is known for certain,
Hibbard's mill whistle will blow three times. Keep on looking till it
does. _Then_" he finished, with a barely perceptible scornful smile at
the attorney, "_then_ we can decide on what had ought to be done."

Six-Cross-Roads lay dark and steaming in the sun that morning. The forge
was silent, the saloon locked up, the roadway deserted, even by the
pigs. The broken old buggy stood rotting in the mud without a
single lean, little old man or woman--such were the children of
the Cross-Roads--to play about it. The fields were empty, and the
rag-stuffed windows blank, under the baleful glance of the horsemen
who galloped by at intervals, muttering curses, not always confining
themselves to muttering them. Once, when the deputy sheriff rode
through alone, a tattered black hound, more wolf than dog, half-emerged,
growling, from beneath one of the tumble-down barns, and was jerked back
into the darkness by his tail, with a snarl fiercer than his own, while
a gun-barrel shone for a second as it swung for a stroke on the brute's
head. The hound did not yelp or whine when the blow fell. He shut his
eyes twice, and slunk sullenly back to his place.

The shanties might have received a volley or two from some of the
mounted bands, exasperated by futile searching, had not the escape of
Homer's prisoners made the guilt of the Cross-Roads appear doubtful in
the minds of many. As the morning waned, the advocates of the theory
that the gamblers had made away with Harkless grew in number. There came
a telegram from the Rouen chief of police that he had a clew to their
whereabouts; he thought they had succeeded in reaching Rouen, and it
began to be generally believed that they had escaped by the one-o'clock
freight, which had stopped to take on some empty cars at a side-track
a mile northwest of the town, across the fields from the Briscoe house.
Toward noon a party went out to examine