“Oh, come here, please do; quick!”

Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.

“I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited,” she went on.  “Come quick.  It’s something too awful for anything.”

In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain kind of pleased curiosity.

“It was just here,” she went on vivaciously, “just here that I went into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,—­and,”—­leading him along at a brisk trot by her side,—­“just here, look, see! this is what I found.”

It was scarcely thirty feet from the road.  The only object that met Cass’s eye was a man’s stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in the grass.  It was new, shiny, and of modish shape.  But it was so incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only stare at it blankly.

“But you’re not looking the right way,” the girl went on sharply; “look there!”

Cass followed the direction of her whip.  At last, what might have seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles to the sky.  It was a dead man!  So palpably dead that life seemed to have taken flight from his very clothes.  So impotent, feeble, and degraded by them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would have been less insulting to humanity.  The head had fallen back, and was partly hidden in a gopher burrow, but the white, upturned face and closed eyes had less of helpless death in them than those wretched enwrappings.  Indeed, one limp hand that lay across the swollen abdomen lent itself to the grotesquely hideous suggestion of a gentleman sleeping off the excesses of a hearty dinner.

“Ain’t he horrid?” continued the girl; “but what killed him?”

Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl’s cold-blooded curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the helpless head.  A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt collar, and matted hair, proved the only record.

“Turn him over again,” said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to relinquish his burden.  “Maybe you’ll find another wound.”

But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a present inquest.