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“I am guardin’ ’em,” said Alf. “I c’n guard ’em just as well from a distance as I can close up, an’ you know it. All I got to do is to walk to the corner there an’ I c’n see Hawkins’s place as plain as anything. I could see it from right here if it wasn’t fer Lamson’s store an’ the Grand View Hotel.”

The marshal gave him a look of bitter scorn, and strode away. The crowd straggled along behind. Anderson stopped at the Banner office door and, exposing the dirty envelope to the eager gaze of the crowd, advised every one present to step in and take out a year’s subscription to the paper. Then he disappeared. The crowd surged forward, filling the outer office with something like sardine compactness. The door to Mr. Squires’s private office, however, closed sharply behind Mr. Crow, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes the young lady bookkeeper was busy taking subscriptions from the disappointed throng. She got sixty-three new subscribers and definite promises from a large number of citizens who were considerably in arrears.

“You’ll see it all in your paper tomorrow morning,” said Anderson, coming out of the inner office at the end of half an hour’s consultation with the editor. “All I can say to you now is that I have captured one of the most desperate criminals in the country. He has been wanted for nearly three years for a diabolical crime. It makes my flesh creep to think of him being loose among our women an’ children all this time. Is there any one here who ain’t subscribed to the Banner?“

Tinkletown slept fitfully that night when it slept at all. The sole citizen enjoying a peaceful night’s rest was Jake Miller. A singular circumstance connected with the broken rest of three-fourths of the people of Tinkletown was the extraordinary unanimity with which Jake became visible to them the instant they did drop off to sleep.

Bright and early the next morning, the Banner appeared with its gruesome story. Jake was in very large type, but not much larger, after all, than Marshal Crow. The whilom Mr. Squires, revelling in generosity, gave Anderson all the credit. He held forth at great length on the achievements of the redoubtable marshal, winding up his account with a recommendation that a movement be inaugurated at once looking to the erection of a memorial statue to the famous “sleuth.” The concluding sentence of this bold panegyric was as follows: “Do not wait till he is dead! Do it now!” And appended, in parentheses, the statement that the Banner would head the list of subscribers with a contribution of one hundred dollars!

In the body of his article, Mr. Squires printed in full the contents of the letter received by Jacob Miller on the afternoon before his death,–the letter which had been recovered, after the most diligent and acute search by Marshal Crow, at the bottom of an abandoned well in Power House Gulley,–the letter which so completely vindicated the theories and deductions of Tinkletown’s most celebrated son.

Jake’s letter was from his brother in Sandusky. It warned him that the authorities had finally located him in Tinkletown and that officers were even then on the way east to “pinch” him. They had run him down at last, despite the various aliases under which he had sought to avoid apprehension; brotherly love impelled him to advise Jake to “beat it” as “quick as possible.” Moreover, he went on to state that if they got him he’d “swing” as sure as hell. Brotherly interest no doubt was also responsible for the frank admission that the “family” had done all it could for him, and that if he had had a grain of sense, or had listened to his friends, he wouldn’t have married her in the first place. And if he hadn’t married her, he wouldn’t have been placed in a position where he had to beat her brains out. Not that she didn’t deserve to have her brains knocked out, and all that, but “you can’t go around doing that sort of thing without getting into trouble about it.”