“No,” said Colonel Case in a combative, resonant tone like the slow boom of a big bell. “No, it is not Mary Kenton.” I was astonished at the animus of his contradiction and we intensified our scrutiny. The nearing girl really suggested Mary Kenton and yet, I felt sure, was not she. Her bearing made me certain that she was young, and she had that indefinable something about her which leads a man to expect that a woman will turn out to be good looking. She walked with a sort of insolent, high-stepping swing. When she was nearly opposite us Case exclaimed in a sort of chopped-off, guttural bark: “Nay, not even in that shape, foul fiend, not even in that.” The tall, shapely young woman turned just in front of the gateway and walked towards us. “I think,” said Beverly, “the lady is coming in.” “No,” said Colonel Case, again with that deep, baying reverberation behind his voice. “No, not coming in.” The young woman laid her hand on the pathway gate and pushed it open. She stepped inside and then stopped, stopped suddenly, abruptly, with an awkward half-stride, as if she had run into an obstacle in the path, a low obstruction like a wheelbarrow. She stood an instant, looked irresolutely right and left, and then stepped back and shut the gate. She turned and started across the street, fairly striding in a sort of incensed, wrathful haste. My eyes, like Beverly’s, were on the figure in the road. It was only with a sort of sidelong vision that I felt rather than saw Case whip a rifle from the door jamb to his shoulder and fire. Almost before the explosion rent my ear drums I saw the figure in the roadway crumple and collapse vertically. Petrified with amazement I was frozen with my stare upon the huddle on the macadam. Beverly had not moved and was as dazed as I. My gaze still fixed as Case threw up a second cartridge from the magazine and fired again, I saw the wretched heap on the piking leap under the impact of the bullet with the yielding quiver of totally dead flesh and bone. A third time he fired and we saw the like. Then the spell of our horror broke and we leapt up, roaring at the murderer. With a single incredibly rapid movement the madman disembarrassed himself of his rifle and held us off, a revolver at each of our heads. “Do you know what you have done?” we yelled together. “I am quite sure of what I have done,” Case replied in a big calm voice, the barrels of his pistols steady as the pillars of the veranda. “But I am not quite so clear whether I have earned five hundred dollars reward. Will you gentlemen be kind enough to step out into the street and examine that carcass?” Woodenly, at the muzzles of those unwavering revolvers, we went down the flagged walk side by side, moving in a nightmare dream. I had never seen a woman killed before and this woman was presumably a lady, young and handsome. I felt the piking of the roadway under my feet, and looked everywhere, except downward in front of me.