Also there was Captain Andy J. Redcliffe, who was sheriff three terms handrunning and, before that, chief of police. Going out of office he went into the livery-stable business; but he didn't seem to make much headway against the Farrell Brothers, who 'owned the other livery stable and were younger men and spry and alert to get trade. He spent a few months sitting at the front door of his yawning, half-empty stables, nursing a grudge against nearly everything and plaintively garrulous on the subject of the ingratitude of republics in general and this republic in particular; and presently he sickened of one of those mysterious diseases that seem to attack elderly men of a full habit of life and to rob them of their health without denuding them of their flesh. His fat sagged on his bones in unwholesome, bloated folds and he wallowed unsteadily when he walked. One morning one of his stable hands found him dead in his office, and the Gideon K. Irons Camp turned out and gave him a comrade's funeral, with full military honors. Also there were two or three others, including ex-County Treasurer Whitford, who shot himself through the head when a busy and conscientious successor found in his accounts a seeming shortage of four hundred and eighty dollars, which afterward turned out to be more a mistake in bookkeeping than anything else. Yet these men--all of them--might have seen what was coming had they watched. The storm that wrecked them was a long time making up--four years before it had threatened them.