l of Number Five this day would be a matter of special
importance.

Of exact details in all these matters, Don Lane knew but little. It was
for reasons of his own, easily obvious, that he went down to the little
station to meet the through train from the West. Anne Oglesby was
coming!

His mother did not accompany him, of course, and he therefore was quite
alone. Of all those whom he encountered hurrying in the same direction,
all those who packed the little platform and who stood here and there in
groups speaking solemnly one with the other, he could count not a
friend, not an acquaintance. Dully he felt that here and there an eye
was turned upon him, that here and there a word was spoken about him. He
dismissed it as part of the aftermath of his own troubles of the
previous day. He walked nervously up and down, impatiently looking
westward down the line of rails, his own contemptuous hatred for all
these lost in the greater emotion that filled his heart. Anne was
coming--she was almost here! And he must say good-by.

Meantime, in the courthouse, there was going forward due action on the
part of the officers of the law intrusted with the solution of such
mysteries as this murder. The sheriff, a large and solid man, Dan Cowles
by name, was one of the first to inspect the premises where the crime
had been committed. Shortly after that he went over to the office of
Blackman, Justice of the Peace and coroner, who by ten o'clock that
morning had summoned his jury of six men--Nels Jorgens, the blacksmith;
Mr. Rawlins, the minister of the Church of Christ; Ben McQuaid, the
traveling man; Newman, the clothing merchant; J. B. Saunders, the Knight
Templar; Jerome Westbrook, clerk in the First National Bank.

It chanced that the county prosecutor, a young man by the name of
Slattery, was out of town at this time, so that the executive side of
the law for a moment hesitated. The sheriff therefore called up Judge
Henderson and asked his presence at the courthouse for a consultation.
The two were closeted for some time in the sheriff's office. At this
time the deliberations of the coroner's jury would have been well
advanced; therefore, Sheriff Cowles took up the telephone and called up
Coroner Blackman at the Tarbush residence, just as the latter was upon
the point of calling for a verdict of the jury in the accustomed words,
"Murder at the hands of party or parties unknown."

"Wait, Mr. Coroner!" said Sheriff Cowles. "There's