Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/126

                                    THE FIGHTING SHEPHERDESS

when the coroner revealed the fact that under the dead man's will she was the sole beneficiary. Her denial of any knowledge of this was received incredulously, and her emphatic declaration that she had never before seen the shotgun carried no conviction.

The coroner and jury, after deliberation, decided that there was not sufficient evidence to hold her, but the real argument which freed her was the cost to the taxpayers of convening a Grand Jury, and the subsequent proceed- ings, if the jury decided to try her.

Kate would as well have been proven guilty and con- victed, for all the difference the verdict of the coroner's jury made in the staring crowd that parted to let her pass as she came from the inquest. She had untied her horse with the unseeing eyes of a sleep-walker and was about to put her foot in the stirrup when Lingle came up to her. "I'm goin' to do all I can to clear you," he said, earnestly, "and I got the mayor behind me. He said he'd use every resource of his office to get this murderer. I believe in you—and don't you forget it!"

She had not been able to speak, but the look in her eyes had thanked him.

Two days later, Kate was disinfecting the wound of a sheep that an untrained dog had injured when a note from the Security State Bank was handed her by one of Neifkins' herders. It was signed by its President, Mr. Vernon Wentz, late of the White Hand Laundry, and there was something which filled her with forebodings in the curt request for an immediate interview.

It was too late to start for Prouty that day, but she would leave early in the morning, so she went on applying a solution of permanganate of potassium to the wound and sprinkling it with a healing powder while she con- jectured as to what Wentz might want of her.

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