she, 'but I was on the inside.' 'Somebody slipped a rope round his
neck and strangled him, and you didn't wake up?' says Harry. 'I didn't
wake up,' she said after him.

"We may have looked as if we didn't see how that could be, for after a
minute she said, 'I sleep sound.'

"Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that
weren't our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to
the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High
Road--the Rivers' place, where there's a telephone."

"And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?" The
attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

"She moved from that chair to this one over here"--Hale pointed to a
small chair in the corner--"and just sat there with her hands held
together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some
conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a
telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and
looked at me--scared."

At sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

"I dunno--maybe it wasn't scared," he hastened; "I wouldn't like to say
it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr.
Peters, and so I guess that's all I know that you don't."

* * *

He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Every
one moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.

"I guess we'll go upstairs first--then out to the barn and around
there."

He paused and looked around the kitchen.

"You're convinced there was nothing important here?" he asked the
sheriff. "Nothing that would--point to any motive?"

The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

"Nothing here but kitchen things," he said, with a little laugh for the
insignificance of kitchen things.

The county attorney was looking at the cupboard--a peculiar, ungainly
structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being
built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen
cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened
the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away
sticky.

"Here's a nice mess," he said resentfully.

The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff's wife spoke.

"Oh--her fruit," she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic
understanding. She turned back to the co