For as he was passing the house he stopped suddenly.  Above the dry, dusty, herbal odors of the plain, above the scent of the new-mown hay within the barn, there was distinctly another fragrance,—­the smell of a pipe.  But where?  Was it his host who had risen to take the outer air?  Then it suddenly flashed upon him that Beasley did not smoke, nor the constable either.  The smell seemed to come from the barn.  Had he followed out the train of ideas thus awakened, all might have been well; but at this moment his attention was arrested by a far more exciting incident to him,—­the draped and hooded figure of Mrs. Beasley was just emerging from the house.  He halted instantly in the shadow, and held his breath as she glided quickly across the intervening space and disappeared in the half-opened door of the barn.  Did she know he was there?  A keen thrill passed over him; his mouth broadened into a breathless smile.  It was his last! for, as he glided forward to the door, the starry heavens broke into a thousand brilliant fragments around him, the earth gave way beneath his feet, and he fell forward with half his skull shot away.

Where he fell there he lay without an outcry, with only one movement,—­the curved and grasping fingers of the fighter’s hand towards his guarded hip.  Where he fell there he lay dead, his face downwards, his good right arm still curved around across his back.  Nothing of him moved but his blood,—­broadening slowly round him in vivid color, and then sluggishly thickening and darkening until it stopped too, and sank into the earth, a dull brown stain.  For an instant the stillness of death followed the echoless report, then there was a quick and feverish rustling within the barn, the hurried opening of a window in the loft, scurrying footsteps, another interval of silence, and then out of the farther darkness the sounds of horse-hoofs in the muffled dust of the road.  But not a sound or movement in the sleeping house beyond.

The stars at last paled slowly, the horizon lines came back,—­a thin streak of opal fire.  A solitary bird twittered in the bush beside the spring.  Then the back door of the house opened, and the constable came forth, half-awakened and apologetic, and with the bewildered haste of a belated man.  His eyes were level, looking for his missing leader as he went on, until at last he stumbled and fell over the now cold and rigid body.  He scrambled to his feet again, cast a hurried glance around him,—­at the half-opened door of the barn, at the floor littered with trampled hay.  In one corner lay the ragged blouse and trousers of the fugitive, which the constable instantly recognized.  He went back to the house, and reappeared in a few moments with Ira, white, stupefied, and hopelessly bewildered; clear only in his statement that his wife had just fainted at the news of the catastrophe, and was equally helpless in her own room.  The constable—­a man of narrow ideas but quick action—­saw it all.  The mystery