Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/155

 the front yard, the side garden, the woodpile, and the outhouses like a colony of disturbed ants, gathering in two large clusters around the kitchen and the barn, nodding, shaking hands, conversing in low tones together, exchanging opinions and passing on gossip. By the time the sheriff of the county arrived a complete theory of the crime had been gathered for him. It was this:

Murdock's old hound had died two days before. Poisoned, no doubt. By whom? By the murderer. Who was he? Well, Murdock had heard, in Centerbrook, that the hired man who had stolen the shotgun was out of jail and threatening him. Why? Because, according to the man's story, he had not stolen the gun; Murdock had stolen it and "planted" it on him.

"He's been drunk down there," Murdock told his neighbor, Heins. "If he comes bleatin' around here I'll blow him full o' buckshot."

But the man's threats and the death of the watch-dog alarmed the household. Murdock bolted his doors and windows at night and slept up-stairs on the floor of an unfinished room of the attic, with his gun beside him. And he carried the gun with him when he went to work in the fields.

That gun—a double-barreled shot-gun—was nowhere to be found. He had evidently stood it beside the kitchen door when he sat down to dinner. And the murderer had crept up, under cover of the kitchen weeds, reached the gun unseen, shot Mur-