hat not idle curiosity, but dire
necessity, as I conceived it, on behalf of the living, could have made
me touch upon the hallowed subject of the loved but unavenged dead."
And he rose to walk away.

Quickly Leigh raised his face, lined, as it seemed to his friend, in one
short five minutes with a whole lifetime of keenest suffering.

"Stop, Kenyon," he said hoarsely, "and excuse my want of self-control.
You are right, the loved and unforgotten dead are passed from us for a
season, peace be with them! Now let us see what we can do to pay our
debts--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, ay, and _blood for
blood_! See here," and he laughed a discordant laugh, which wrung
Kenyon's very soul by the pitiful wail with which it closed, as the
strong man broke down and sobbed in a bitter agony of keen remembrance.
"See here," he said, as he again pulled himself together, and opened the
back of his watch, from which he extracted a small scrap of paper, "they
found this pinned to the coverlid of my darling's bed."

The detective reached over and took the paper, but before looking at it
he poured out, and insisted upon Leigh drinking, a stiff glass of
brandy, for he saw that his friend was completely unhinged.

This done, he turned his whole attention to the morsel of paper lying in
his hand, and this was what he saw. Simply a small white sheet with a
circular, dead black line drawn thus upon it:--

Pinned on a dead woman's breast, what did this senseless hieroglyphic
mean?

To doctors and detectives, _nothing_!

To the bereaved and desperate husband, _nothing_!!

To Stanforth Kenyon, the wily American detective, _nothing_!!!

"_Nothing_!" gentle reader, just that, and no more.

One glance he gave--but one; then, springing to his feet, fairly
palpitating with excitement, he almost screamed, "I knew it, I knew it.
Zero! Zero! by the Living God!" and as if it were a sombre echo of his
words, a rifle spirted its vivid jet of flame from the outer gloom
beyond the camp fire, and one of the native guides sitting just behind
Kenyon sprang into the air with a bullet through his brain, and fell to
the ground a corpse.

Instantly the whole party sought cover, but no further attempt of any
kind was made to molest them, and when morning dawned they could nowhere
find a trace of the dastard who had fired the fatal shot, and all that
remained for them to do was to bury the body of their poor, unoffending
servant, and choose o