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"Tug, what good will it do you to cuss out the bank, if you don't git yore money?"

Mr. Beavers scratched his head. "Well, a cussin' out is a cussin' out, Abner. Nobody likes to take a cussin' out, an' I reckon that's why ever'body likes to give one."

Abner began to perceive dimly Mr. Beavers's point of view, when Tug suddenly bawled out to someone up the street, "Well, for the love of Sukey, look yonder what the dawgs drug home!"

Abner looked and saw a short stocky man with a typical hard hill-country face now set in a grin of pleasure at Mr. Beavers's perfumed greeting. The moment he was espied half-a-dozen voices took up the chorus simultaneously, "Why, hey-oh, Peck Bradley!" "How'd je git out, Peck?" "Air ye out fer good, Peck?"

The man continued his hard-lined grin and explained laconically, "Same as—hung jury."

"But looks like they'd slapped you back in jail?"

"Hab a corpse," elucidated Mr. Bradley briefly.

"Well, I be derned!" cried Tug with genuine admiration in his voice. "You shore are a hellion! Out on hab a corpse—though of course you did."

Here Mr. Bradley's hard face straightened from its smiling into something wooden and somewhat troubled. "Shore! Shore!" he drawled, and evidently would have done with the topic.

Abner was thrilling with curiosity. He clutched Mr. Beavers's arm.

"What do you mean, Tug, out on hab a corpse?"

The hillman frowned on the boy and explained in a hurried undertone, "When you kill a man and can show the corpse, they kain't keep you in jail."

Abner was aghast, "Fuh God's sake—why?"

"Damn it!" whispered Mr Beavers, thoroughly irritated at such an awkward explanation in the presence of Peck, "because you got the corpse there to show, I reckon. Anyway, yore lawyer gits you out on hab a corpse."