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do somethin'—it was self-defence pyore an' simple. . . . He went on to say he would get Buck Sharp for his lawyer. He guessed Buck would pull him through. As a matter of fact, when Tug's body was found his automatic had just been fired and five cartridges were missing from the clip.

Now every person in Irontown knew those missing five cartridges were ex post facto evidence. Peck simply had shot them away. But the social centres of Irontown, butcher shop, grocery, and drug store, conned this testimony which Peck clearly meant to give in his trial, and all agreed that it hung together. Whether or not the prosecuting attorney would be able to pick it to pieces the gossips did not know. They surmised not. At least, he had not in the Shelton case. Besides that, Peck had been haled before the courts on two or three cases of hog theft and he had always displayed a curious ingenuity in coming off scot free.

The cunning with which Peck Bradley had planned his crime and now was building up his defence excited a certain admiration in the village. It was a parade in criminal violence of the same genre as one of Railroad Jones's coups in financial trickery. In each instance the actor saw the law clearly as an obstacle and evaded it. Such illegal technique demanded its meed of admiration.

However, there was one fault with Peck's achievement: he had ambushed Tug after his rival had whipped him in a fair fight at the Warrington dance.

Tom Northcutt, the miller, in talking about the matter in Fuller's drug store, said he "didn't think after Tug had licked Peck in a fair fight, Peck ort to of ambushed Tug—it didn't look right."

Every man in the circle agreed by words or nods to this sentiment, and a queer sentiment it was. The implication being that if Tug had not whipped Peck, Peck's ambush would have been justified.

Such a fantastic twist to hill morals was a relic of the old Indian fighters who first settled the country. These Indian fighters used the ambush freely, but when two white men