Carelessly opening the front door, which to his surprise was not locked, the sheriff was amazed to see, lying on the floor of the passage into which it opened, a confused heap of men’s apparel.  Examination showed it to consist of two hats, and the same number of coats, waistcoats, and scarves all in a remarkably good state of preservation, albeit somewhat defiled by the dust in which they lay.  Mr. Brewer was equally astonished, but Mr. King’s emotion is not of record.  With a new and lively interest in his own actions the sheriff now unlatched and pushed open a door on the right, and the three entered.  The room was apparently vacant—­no; as their eyes became accustomed to the dimmer light something was visible in the farthest angle of the wall.  It was a human figure—­that of a man crouching close in the corner.  Something in the attitude made the intruders halt when they had barely passed the threshold.  The figure more and more clearly defined itself.  The man was upon one knee, his back in the angle of the wall, his shoulders elevated to the level of his ears, his hands before his face, palms outward, the fingers spread and crooked like claws; the white face turned upward on the retracted neck had an expression of unutterable fright, the mouth half open, the eyes incredibly expanded.  He was stone dead.  Yet with the exception of a bowie-knife, which had evidently fallen from his own hand, not another object was in the room.

In thick dust that covered the floor were some confused footprints near the door and along the wall through which it opened.  Along one of the adjoining walls, too, past the boarded-up windows was the trail made by the man himself in reaching his corner.  Instinctively in approaching the body the three men followed that trail.  The sheriff grasped one of the outthrown arms; it was as rigid as iron, and the application of a gentle force rocked the entire body without altering the relation of its parts.  Brewer, pale with excitement, gazed intently into the distorted face.  “God of mercy!” he suddenly cried, “it is Manton!”

“You are right,” said King, with an evident attempt at calmness:  “I knew Manton.  He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this is he.”

He might have added:  “I recognized him when he challenged Rosser.  I told Rosser and Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible trick.  When Rosser left this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt sleeves—­all through the discreditable proceedings we knew with whom we were dealing, murderer and coward that he was!”

But nothing of this did Mr. King say.  With his better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man’s death.  That he had not once moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he saw—­these were circumstances which Mr. King’s disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend.