ody present, not excluding Brent, knew the man at whom the
Superintendent of Police was staring, and who evidently wished to
address the Coroner. He was Mr. Samuel John Epplewhite, an elderly,
highly respectable tradesman of the town, and closely associated with
that Forward Party in the Town Council of which the late Mayor had
become the acknowledged leader; a man of substance and repute, who would
not break in without serious reason upon proceedings of the sort then
going on. The Coroner, following Hawthwaite's glance, nodded to him.

"You wish to make some observation, Mr. Epplewhite?" he inquired.

"Before you adjourn, sir, if you please," replied Epplewhite, "I should
like to make a statement--evidence, in fact, sir. I think, after what
we've heard, that it's highly necessary that I should."

"Certainly," answered the Coroner. "Anything you can tell, of course.
Then, perhaps you'll step into the witness-box?"

The folk who crowded the court to its very doors looked on impatiently
while Epplewhite went through the legal formalities. Laying down the
Testament on which he had taken the oath, he turned to the Coroner. But
the Coroner again nodded to him.

"You had better tell us what is in your mind in your own way, Mr.
Epplewhite," he said. "We are, of course, in utter ignorance of what it
is you can tell. Put it in your own fashion."

Epplewhite folded his hands on the ledge of the witness-box and looked
around the court before finally settling his eyes on the Coroner: it
seemed to Brent as if he were carefully considering the composition,
severally and collectively, of his audience.

"Well, sir," he began, in slow, measured accents, "what I have to say,
as briefly as I can, is this: everybody here, I believe, is aware that
our late Mayor and myself were on particularly friendly terms. We'd
always been more or less of friends since his first coming to the town:
we'd similar tastes and interests. But our friendship had been on an
even more intimate basis during the last year or two, and especially of
recent months, owing, no doubt, to the fact that we belonged to the same
party on the Town Council, and were both equally anxious to bring about
a thorough reform in the municipal administration of the borough. When
Mr. Wallingford was elected Mayor last November, he and I, and our
supporters on the Council, resolved that during his year of office we
would do our best to sweep away certain crying abuses and generall