Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/159

 He struck out across the fields to Murdock's wood-lot, and they followed him. As they went Murdock pointed out significantly to the sheriff the fence-line between his father's farm and Heins's; it was a thick hedge of small cedars, sassafras, blackberry brambles, and poison ivy, and it ran from the Murdock garden-patch to the edge of the woods toward which they were walking. The sheriff looked at it and nodded.

They entered the wood-lot at a pole gate, came to a brook where cows were pasturing on a little clearing of grass and brambles, crossed the stream on stepping-stones, and followed a cow-path through the underbrush into the taller timber.

The hired man stopped at the first of the cedars that he had cut down. "Yep," the sheriff said. "Where's the rest?"

The rest were in a bend of the stream at the foot of a raw bank of red shale that confined the creek at flood-time. The sheriff looked them over. "Well?" he said, inquiringly, to Murdock. Murdock pointed to a large flat stone at the foot of the bank. "Tell him to turn that over."

He spoke to the sheriff, but he was looking at the hired man.

"What for?" the sheriff asked.

"Tell him to do it."

The man apparently had not heard. He was standing aside, gazing strangely at a shrub of scarlet sumac in front of him.