gh the room was packed to the doors, nothing startling was
anticipated from the coroner's inquest; and while Kate had been summoned
as a witness it was not expected that much would be learned from her
testimony. The crowd was concerned chiefly in seeing "how she was taking
it."

But curiosity became suspicion and suspicion conviction, when Kate, as
white as the alabastine wall behind her, admitted that she and Mormon
Joe had quarreled the night before the murder, and over money; that she
knew how to set a trap-gun and had set them frequently for mountain
lions; that she could ride forty miles in a few hours if necessary. The
sensation came, however, when the coroner revealed the fact that under
the dead man's will she was the sole beneficiary. Her denial of any
knowledge of this was received incredulously, and her emphatic
declaration that she had never before seen the shotgun carried no
conviction.

The coroner and jury, after deliberation, decided that there was not
sufficient evidence to hold her, but the real argument which freed her
was the cost to the taxpayers of convening a Grand Jury, and the
subsequent proceedings, if the jury decided to try her.

Kate would as well have been proven guilty and convicted, for all the
difference the verdict of the coroner's jury made in the staring crowd
that parted to let her pass as she came from the inquest. She had untied
her horse with the unseeing eyes of a sleep-walker and was about to put
her foot in the stirrup when Lingle came up to her.

"I'm goin' to do all I can to clear you," he said, earnestly, "and I got
the mayor behind me. He said he'd use every resource of his office to
get this murderer. I believe in you--and don't you forget it!"

She had not been able to speak, but the look in her eyes had thanked
him.

Two days later, Kate was disinfecting the wound of a sheep that an
untrained dog had injured when a note from the Security State Bank was
handed her by one of Neifkins' herders. It was signed by its President,
Mr. Vernon Wentz, late of the White Hand Laundry, and there was
something which filled her with forebodings in the curt request for an
immediate interview.

It was too late to start for Prouty that day, but she would leave early
in the morning, so she went on applying a solution of permanganate of
potassium to the wound and sprinkling it with a healing powder while she
conjectured as to what Wentz might want of her.

In her usual work Kate fo