“What I’ve got to say to ye, Mrs. Wade,—­as I reckon you be,—­is strictly private and confidential!  Why, ye’ll see afore I get through.  But I thought I might just as well caution ye agin our being disturbed.”

Overcoming a slight instinct of repulsion, Mrs. Wade returned, “You can speak to me here; no one will interrupt you—­unless I call them,” she added with a little feminine caution.

“And I reckon ye won’t do that,” he said with a grim smile.  “You are the widow o’ Pulaski Wade, late o’ Heavy Tree Hill, I reckon?”

“I am,” said Mrs. Wade.

“And your husband’s buried up thar in the graveyard, with a monument over him setting forth his virtues ez a Christian and a square man and a high-minded citizen?  And that he was foully murdered by highwaymen?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wade, “that is the inscription.”

“Well, ma’am, a bigger pack o’ lies never was cut on stone!”

Mrs. Wade rose, half in indignation, half in terror.

“Keep your sittin’,” said the stranger, with a warning wave of his hand.  “Wait till I’m through, and then you call in the hull State o’ Californy, ef ye want.”

The stranger’s manner was so doggedly confident that Mrs. Wade sank back tremblingly in her chair.  The man put his slouch hat on his knee, twirled it round once or twice, and then said with the same stubborn deliberation:—­

“The highwayman in that business was your husband—­Pulaski Wade—­and his gang, and he was killed by one o’ the men he was robbin’.  Ye see, ma’am, it used to be your husband’s little game to rope in three or four strangers in a poker deal at Spanish Jim’s saloon—­I see you’ve heard o’ the place,” he interpolated as Mrs. Wade drew back suddenly—­“and when he couldn’t clean ’em out in that way, or they showed a little more money than they played, he’d lay for ’em with his gang in a lone part of the trail, and go through them like any road agent.  That’s what he did that night—­and that’s how he got killed.”

“How do you know this?” said Mrs. Wade, with quivering lips.

“I was one o’ the men he went through before he was killed.  And I’d hev got my money back, but the rest o’ the gang came up, and I got away jest in time to save my life and nothin’ else.  Ye might remember thar was one man got away and giv’ the alarm, but he was goin’ on to the States by the overland coach that night and couldn’t stay to be a witness.  I was that man.  I had paid my passage through, and I couldn’t lose that too with my other money, so I went.”

Mrs. Wade sat stunned.  She remembered the missing witness, and how she had longed to see the man who was last with her husband; she remembered Spanish Jim’s saloon—­his well-known haunt; his frequent and unaccountable absences, the sudden influx of money which he always said he had won at cards; the diamond ring he had given her as the result of “a bet;” the forgotten recurrence of