l Gaylord
paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life."

We pondered this in silence for a moment, then the sheriff voiced a
feeling which, to a slight extent, had been lurking in the background of
my own consciousness, in spite of my relief at the denouement.

"It's kind of disappointing when you've got your mind worked up to
something big, to find in the end that there was nothing but a chance
nigger at the bottom of all that mystery. Seems sort of a let-down."

Terry eyed him with an air of grim humor, then he leaned across the
table and spoke with a ring of conviction that carried his message home.

"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel Gaylord was not a
chance nigger. There was no chance about it. Colonel Gaylord killed
himself. He committed suicide--as truly as if he had blown out his
brains with a gun. He did it with his uncontrollable temper. The man
was an egoist. He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as
of supreme importance. He has tried to crush the life and spirit and
independence from everyone about him. But once too often he wreaked his
anger upon an innocent person--at least upon a person that for all he
knew was innocent--and at one stroke his past injustices were avenged.
It was not chance that killed Colonel Gaylord. It was the inevitable law
of cause and effect. 'Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his
first fit of passion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this.
Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him.

"Oh, I've seen it a hundred times! It's character that tells. I've seen
it happen to a political boss--a man whose business it was to make
friends with every voter high and low. I've seen him forget, just once,
and turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot
and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And
I've seen that man, the most insignificant of the politician's
followers, work and plot and scheme to overthrow him; and in the end
succeed. The big man never knew what struck him. He thought it was luck,
chance, a turn of the wheel. He never dreamed that it was his own
character hitting back. I've seen it so often, I'm a fatalist. I don't
believe in chance. It was Colonel Gaylord who killed himself, and he
commenced it fifty years ago."

"It's God's own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly.

The sheriff had listened to Terry's words with an anxiously reminiscent