rd
sprang from the cliff and shot crashing into the tops of the pines
below!

How and how long afterward I reached the place I cannot say, but Richard
Benning was already there, kneeling beside the dreadful thing that had
been a woman.

"She is dead--quite dead," he said coldly. "I will go to town for
assistance. Please do me the favor to remain."

He rose to his feet and moved away, but in a moment had stopped and
turned about.

"You have doubtless observed, my friend," he said, "that this was
entirely her own act. I did not rise in time to prevent it, and you, not
knowing her mental condition--you could not, of course, have suspected."

His manner maddened me.

"You are as much her assassin," I said, "as if your damnable hands had
cut her throat." He shrugged his shoulders without reply and, turning,
walked away. A moment later I heard, through the deepening shadows of
the wood into which he had disappeared, a rich, strong, baritone voice
singing "_La donna e mobile_," from "Rigoletto."

THE FAMOUS GILSON BEQUEST

It was rough on Gilson. Such was the terse, cold, but not altogether
unsympathetic judgment of the better public opinion at Mammon Hill--the
dictum of respectability. The verdict of the opposite, or rather the
opposing, element--the element that lurked red-eyed and restless about
Moll Gurney's "deadfall," while respectability took it with sugar at Mr.
Jo. Bentley's gorgeous "saloon"--was to pretty much the same general
effect, though somewhat more ornately expressed by the use of
picturesque expletives, which it is needless to quote. Virtually, Mammon
Hill was a unit on the Gilson question. And it must be confessed that in
a merely temporal sense all was not well with Mr. Gilson. He had that
morning been led into town by Mr. Brentshaw and publicly charged with
horse stealing; the sheriff meantime busying himself about The Tree with
a new manila rope and Carpenter Pete being actively employed between
drinks upon a pine box about the length and breadth of Mr. Gilson.
Society having rendered its verdict, there remained between Gilson and
eternity only the decent formality of a trial.

These are the short and simple annals of the prisoner: He had recently
been a resident of New Jerusalem, on the north fork of the Little Stony,
but had come to the newly discovered placers of Mammon Hill immediately
before the "rush" by which the former place was depopulated. The
discovery of the new diggings had