"It is."

"Have you any thing more to show me?" asked Mr. Byrd.

"Only this," responded the other, taking out of his pocket the torn-off
corner of a newspaper. "I found this blowing about under the bushes out
there," said he. "Look at it and tell me from what paper it was torn."

"I don't know," said Mr. Byrd; "none that I am acquainted with."

"You don't read the Buffalo _Courier_?"

"Oh, is this----"

"A corner from the Buffalo _Courier_? I don't know, but I mean to find
out. If it is, and the date proves to be correct, we won't have much
trouble about the little link, will we?"

Mr. Byrd shook his head and they again crouched down over the fire.

"And, now, what did you learn in Buffalo?" inquired the persistent
Hickory.

"Not much," acknowledged Mr. Byrd. "The man Brown was entirely too
ubiquitous to give me my full chance. Neither at the house nor at the
mill was I able to glean any thing beyond an admission from the landlady
that Mr. Mansell was not at home at the time of his aunt's murder. I
couldn't even learn where he was on that day, or where he had ostensibly
gone? If it had not been for the little girl of Mr. Goodman----"

"Ah, I had not time to go to that house," interjected the other,
suggestively.

"I should have come home as wise as I went," continued Mr. Byrd. "She
told me that on the day before Mr. Mansell returned, he wrote to her
father from Monteith, and _that_ settled my mind in regard to him. It
was pure luck, however."

The other laughed long and loud.

"I didn't know I did it up so well," he cried. "I told the landlady you
were a detective, or acted like one, and she was very ready to take the
alarm, having, as I judge, a motherly liking for her young boarder. Then
I took Messrs. Chamberlin and Harrison into my confidence, and having
got from them all the information they could give me, told them there
was evidently another man on the track of this Mansell, and warned them
to keep silence till they heard from the prosecuting attorney in Sibley.
But I didn't know who you were, or, at least, I wasn't sure; or, as I
said before, I shouldn't have presumed."

The short, dry laugh with which he ended this explanation had not
ceased, when Mr. Byrd observed:

"You have not told me what _you_ gathered in Buffalo."

"Much," quoth Hickory, reverting to his favorite laconic mode of speech.
"First, that Mansell went from home on Monday, the day before the
murder, for the purpose, as he s