“Why didn’t they electrocute him?” demanded young Higgins.

“Well, the murder wasn’t exactly premeditated.  Hap wasn’t himself; he was drunk—­not even able to run away when Sheriff Crumpett arrived in the neighbourhood to take him into custody.  Then there was Hap’s bringing up.  All these made extenuating circumstances.”

“There was something about Sheriff Wiley’s pompadour,” suggested our little lady proofreader.

“Yes,” returned the editor.  “Mart had a queer head of hair.  It was dark and stiff, and he brushed it straight back in a pompadour.  When he was angry or excited, it actually rose on his scalp like wire.  Hap’s counsel made a great fuss over Mart’s pompadour and the part it sort of played in egging Hap on.  The sight of it, stiffening and rising the way it did maddened Ruggam so that he beat it down hysterically in retaliation for the many grudges he fancied he owed the officer.  No, it was all right to make the sentence life-imprisonment, only it should have been an asylum.  Hap’s not right.  You’d know it without being told.  I guess it’s his eyes.  They aren’t mates.  They light up weirdly when he’s drunk or excited, and if you know what’s healthy, you get out of the way.”

By eight o’clock that evening most of the valley’s deer-hunters, all of the local adventurers who could buy, borrow or beg a rifle, and the usual quota of high-school sons of thoughtless parents were off on the man-hunt in the eastern mountains.

Among them was Sheriff Crumpett’s party.  On reaching the timberline they separated.  It was agreed that if any of them found signs of Ruggam, the signal for assistance was five shots in quick succession “and keep shooting at intervals until the rest come up.”

We newspaper folk awaited the capture with professional interest and pardonable excitement....

In the northern part of our town, a mile out on the Wickford road, is the McBride place.  It is a small white house with a red barn in the rear and a neat rail fence inclosing the whole.  Six years ago Cora McBride was bookkeeper in the local garage.  Her maiden name was Allen.  The town called her “Tomboy Allen.”  She was the only daughter of old Zeb Allen, for many years our county game-warden.  Cora, as we had always known—­and called—­her, was a full-blown, red-blooded, athletic girl who often drove cars for her employer in the days when steering-wheels manipulated by women were offered as clinching proof that society was headed for the dogs.

Duncan McBride was chief mechanic in the garage repairshop.  He was an affable, sober, steady chap, popularly known as “Dunk the Dauntless” because of an uncanny ability to cope successfully with the ailments of 90 per cent, of the internal-combustion hay-balers and refractory tin-Lizzies in the county when other mechanics had given them up in disgust.

When he married his employer’s bookkeeper, Cora’s folks gave her a wedding that carried old Zeb within half an hour of insolvency and ran to four columns in the local daily.  Duncan and the Allen girl motored to Washington in a demonstration-car, and while Dunk was absent, the yard of the garage resembled the premises about a junkshop.  On their return they bought the Johnson place, and Cora quickly demonstrated the same furious enthusiasm for homemaking and motherhood that she had for athletics and carburetors.