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“I’m not afeared of rain,” said Higgins.

“What are you goin’ over there this time o’ night for?” asked the other. “You ain’t got much of a load.”

“I’m–I’m takin’ some meat over to Mr. Talbert.”

“Hams?”

“No; jest bacon,” answered Scott, and his two hearers in the wagon-bed laughed silently.

“Not many people out a night like this,” volunteered the deputy.

“Nope.”

“That a tarpaulin you got in the back of the bed? Jest saw it by the lightnin’.”

“Got the bacon kivered to keep it from gittin’ wet ‘n case it rains,” hastily interposed Scott. He was discussing within himself the advisability of knocking the deputy from the seat and whipping the team into a gallop, leaving him behind.

“You don’t mind my crawlin’ under the tarpaulin if it rains, do you, Scott?”

“There ain’t no–no room under it, Harry, an’ I won’t allow that bacon to git wet under no consideration.”

A generous though nerve-racking crash of thunder changed the current of conversation. It drifted from the weather immediately, however, to a one-sided discussion of the escaped horse thief.

“I guess he’s a purty slick one,” they heard the deputy say. “Austin said he had him dead to rights in his barn! That big bulldog of his had him treed on a beam, but when we got there, just after dark, the darned cuss was gone, an’ the dog was trapped up in a box-stall. By thunder, it showed how desperate the feller is. He evidently come down from that beam an’ jest naturally picked that turrible bulldog up by the neck an’ throwed him over into the stall.”

“Have you got a revolver?” asked Higgins loudly.

“Sure! You don’t s’pose I’d go up against that kind of a man without a gun, do you?”

“Oh, goodness!” some one whispered in Crosby’s ear.

“But he ain’t armed,” argued Higgins. “If he’d had a gun don’t you s’pose he’d shot that dog an’ got away long before he did?”

“That shows how much you know about these crooks, Higgins,” said the other loftily. “He had a mighty good reason for not shooting the dog.”

“What was the reason?”

“I don’t know jest what it was, but any darned fool ought to see that he had a reason. Else why didn’t he shoot? Course he had a reason. But the funny part of the whole thing is what has become of the woman.”

“What woman?”

“That widder,” responded the other, and Crosby felt her arm harden. “I never thought much o’ that woman. You’d think she owned the whole town of Dexter to see her paradin’ around the streets, showin’ off her city clothes, an’ all such stuff. They do say she led George Delancy a devil of a life, an’ it’s no wonder he died.”

“The wretch!” came from the rear of the wagon.

“Well, she’s up and skipped out with the horse thief. Austin says she tried to protect him, and I guess they had a regular family row over the affair. She’s gone an’ the man’s gone, an’ it looks darned suspicious. He was a good-lookin’ feller, Austin says, an’ she’s dead crazy to git another man, I’ve heard. Dang me, it’s jest as I said to Davis: I wouldn’t put it above her to take up with this good-lookin’ thief an’ skip off with him. Her husband’s been dead more’n two year, an’ she’s too darned purty to stay in strict mournin’ longer’n she has to—“

But just then something strong, firm, and resistless grasped his neck from behind, and, even as he opened his mouth to gasp out his surprise and alarm, a vise-like grip shut down on his thigh, and then, he was jerked backward, lifted upward, tossed outward, falling downward. The wagon clattered off in the night, and a tall man and a woman looked over the side of the wagon-bed and waited for the next flash of lightning to show them where the official gossiper had fallen. The long, blinding, flash came, and Crosby saw the man as he picked himself from the ditch at the roadside.