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stolen, and murdered—to this end. It was Peck Bradley, focussed to pure intellect at last.

The thing looked curiously shrunken and small. It seemed strange that the whole village should have made such a to-do over so trifling an object. It looked now as if one man—any man—might have done it. It was so small, shattered, and passive. The clothes were flecked with little round targets of dust where the bullets had struck. The thing never had got itself washed or combed after its three-days chase in the woods.

The head with its hog-bristle hair was bent at an awkward angle, and the face, rather badly shot, bore a certain messy grin as if there were a kind of jest in the fact that the very archtype of one stratum of hill-country illegal savoir faire should be seized upon by emulous fellow citizens and so sadly misprized. The body turned and returned to show the extent of its mishandling.

When Abner went closer he saw that one of its ears, two fingers, and a thumb had been cut cleanly off by souvenir hunters; men afraid, perhaps, they would forget this.

Abner stared and stared in a kind of mental syncope. It seemed to him as if he were peering through this body into another and a horrible world of which he had never even dreamed. The slowly revolving figure filled the earth with a terrible insecurity.

Then Abner observed that the mob had hanged Peck just above the place where he had lain in wait for Tug Beavers. With the melodramatic instinct of an uncultured folk, Irontown had brought Peck here. The implication was that this was not a dirty, hideous job, the sooner finished, the better; it was a processional, a rite, a holiday, a tidbit to be served with melodramatic sauce to the public palate. Abner himself, when he observed this, felt that it was a fine stroke.

A voice behind the youth shocked him profoundly.

"I'm glad to see you were not in this lynching party, Abner."