orious services in the late war. He was a broad-shouldered
large-headed man, with keen, good-natured eyes, a firm mouth, and rather
prominent chin. We scraped up an acquaintance at once on the strength of
our Legion buttons.

"I'm glad theya's a suvice man heah," he confessed to me. "It's sho' a
mess of a case--and my deputy is busy. I've neveh wo'ked among these
millionaih Yankee spo'ts befo', but I suppose they ah all right. Now
tell me what you think of it all."

"I don't think," I confessed. "It doesn't make good sense."

He asked me questions in the vernacular of the South, and I answered
them the best I could. Then he introduced me to the coroner.

Mr. Weldon was a man of about forty years, intelligent, forceful, not
in the least the mournful type so often seen among undertakers. He was
rather careless in speech, but I did not ascribe it to lack of
education. He had rather a Semitic countenance, and a very deep, manly
voice.

"Of course the first thing is to drag the lagoon," he said. "We've got
to have a body before we can hold anything but a semblance of an
inquest--and of course thet's where the body is. It couldn't be
nowhere's else."

All of us agreed with him. There was simply nothing else to do. The body
had lain but thirty feet from the water's edge: it was conceivable that
for some mysterious reason the murderer had seen fit to return and drag
his dead into the water. The idea of him carrying it in any other
direction was incredible.

While we waited for drag hooks to be sent out from town the sheriff made
a minute examination of the scene of the crime. He searched the ground
for clews; and it seemed to me the little puzzled line between his brows
deepened with every moment of the search. He stood up at last, breathing
hard.

"The murderer made a clean get away, that's certain," he observed. "It
isn't often a man can commit a crime like this and not leave a few
trails. I can't find a trace or a button. And if he left any tracks they
are mixed up with those you gentlemen made last night."

He went carefully over the rocks between the place where the body had
lain and the water; but there was little for him here. Once or twice he
paused, studying the rocks with a careful scrutiny, but he did not tell
us what he found.

About ten the drag-hooks came, and I helped Nealman bring his duckboat
from the marshy end of the lagoon. Then the sheriff, the coroner and
myself began the slow, tiresome work o