and put her hands gently upon
the short-cropped, curling hair. "Oh, Arthur! Is it you?" Only now
did she know how this man with the young, frank face had died. Now she
saw blood smeared on the white forehead, a bullet wound torn in the
temple. She sprang to her feet, staring with wide eyes at the little
hole through which the man's soul had fled. She turned hastily toward
her horse, came back, placed her straw hat tenderly over the short
curling hair, and ran to Gypsy.

She was vaguely conscious that her brain was acting as it had never
acted before, that her excited nerves were filling her mind with a mass
of sensations and fragmentary thoughts strangely clearcut and definite.
Like some wonderfully constructed camera her faculties, in an instant
no longer than the time required for the clicking of the shutter,
photographed a hawk circling high up in the sky, a waving branch, with
no less truth and vividness than the body sprawling there in the grass.
Emotions, scents, sounds, objects blended into a strange mental
snap-shot, no one detail less clear than another.

Jerking the mare's tie rope free from the oak, she flung herself into
the saddle, and turned back toward the trail that led across the creek
and over the ridge. But Shep had found something else in the grass
half a dozen steps beyond the dead man, something that he sniffed at
and nosed and that excited him. Making a little detour, she rode back
to the spot where the dog, barking now, was waiting for her.

As she leaned forward looking down upon this second thing the shepherd
dog had found, she clutched suddenly at the horn of her saddle as
though all her strength had dribbled out of her, and she were going to
fall. The keen nostrils of the animal had led him to this object with
its sinister connection with the tragedy and he had pawed at it,
dragging it toward him and free of the green tangle into which it had
fallen or been flung.

It was a revolver, thirty-eight calibre, unlike the weapons one might
expect to find here in the range country or about the sawmills further
back . . . and the girl recognised it. The deadly viciousness of the
firearm was disguised by the pearl grip and silver chasings until it
had seemed a toy. But here was Arthur Shandon dead, with a bullet in
his brain, and here almost at his side was a revolver she knew so well.
. . .

She covered her face with her hands and shook like one of the pine
needles above her head cau