was common that he would kill Ward some day. But there was
something about this accident that was not clear. Mean as his fame put
him, the Black Abbot had never been known to fall in all of his vicious
life. On his right knee there was a great furrow, long as a man's finger
and torn at one corner. It was scarcely the sort of wound that the edge
of a stone would make on a falling horse.

Ump and Jud and old Jourdan examined this wound for half a night, and
finally declared that the horse had been shot. They pointed out that
this was the furrow of a bullet, because hair was carried into the
wound, and nothing but a bullet carries the hair with it. The fibres of
the torn muscle were all forced one way, a characteristic of the track
of a bullet, and the edge of the wound on the inside of the horse's knee
was torn. This was the point from which a bullet, if fired from the
opposite side of the river, would emerge; and it is well known that a
bullet tears as it comes out. At least this is always true with a
muzzle-loading rifle. Ward expressed no opinion. He only drew down his
dark eyebrows when the three experts went in to tell him, and directed
them to swing Black Abbot in his stall, and bandage the knee. But I
talked with Ump about it, and in the light of these after events it was
tolerably clear.

At this point of the road, the roar of the falls would entirely drown
the report of a rifle, and the face of any convenient rock would cover
the flash. The graze of a bullet on the knee would cause any horse to
fall, and if he fell here, the rider was almost certain to sustain some
serious injury if he were not killed. True, it was a piece of good
shooting at fifty yards, but both Peppers and Malan could "bark" a
squirrel at that distance.

If this were the first move in Woodford's elaborate plan, then there was
trouble ahead, and plenty of trouble. The horses came to a walk at a
little stream below Roy's tavern, and we rode up slowly.

The tavern was a long, low house with a great porch, standing back in a
well-sodded yard. We dismounted, tied the horses to the fence, and
crossed the path to the house. As I approached, I heard a voice say, "If
the other gives 'em up, old Nicholas won't." Then I lifted the latch and
flung the door open.

I stopped with my foot on the threshold. At the table sat Lem Marks, his
long, thin legs stretched out, and his hat over his eyes. On the other
side was Malan and, sitting on the corner of t