"You got a job of detectin' on hand now," said old Gabe. "And, as I was sayin', a rifle ball acts different. Maybe it kills you the first shot, and maybe you can hold three or four rifle bullets before you die, but if they keep on shootin' at you, you get killed sooner or later. Probably five shots is all any man could stand. I guess that's about it. [Illustration: "THERE AIN'T A DAY HE DON'T SHOOT AND HIT ME"] "And then you come down to one of them little twenty-two caliber revolvers. If he don't hit you in the heart, a murderer could easy enough shoot at you twenty-five times with one of them little twenty-two's before he killed you dead. But you'd be dead sooner or later. It's just a matter of what a man shoots you with that makes the difference in time. "Of course," he continued agreeably, "you don't expect no pea-shooter to kill me as quick as a thirteen-inch gun would. If you expect that you're unreasonable. But the principle is just the same. Shootin' is shootin'. You know how that pome goes-- 'The constant drip of water Wears away the hardest stone--' and that's just as true of murderin' a man with a pea-shooter. "And the beauty of it is that nobody knows you're committin' a murder. If anybody catches you and asks you what you're doin' you just say, 'Oh, nothin'. Just shootin' peas.'" "Maybe that's so," agreed Philo Gubb. "It sounds reasonable. But the thing for me to do is to wait until you're dead and then catch the feller. It ain't a murder until you're dead." "It ain't, ain't it?" sneered old Gabe. "You'd wait until I am dead, I suppose, and then start out to catch the feller. And you'd lose all the help I can give you. It ain't often a detective can get the corpse to help him like this." "No, it ain't," agreed Philo Gubb. "I got a suspicion who the feller is," said Gabe. "Who?" asked Philo Gubb. "You'll go ahead with the case? On the terms we settled on?" asked old Gabe. Philo Gubb considered this carefully. "Why, yes," he said at length, "I will. Who is the feller you think is doin' it?" "Farrin'ton Pierce, the cashier of the Farmers' and Citizens' Bank," said old Gabe, his eyes shining with malice and shrewdness, as he leaned forward and whispered the words. "My own son-in-law, he is. An' I'll tell you why he's tryin' it. For my money. So his wife'll get it, an' he can be president of the bank in my place." "You've seen him have a pea-shooter?" asked Philo Gubb. "No, sir!" said old Gabe. "And I never seen one of the peas. All I ever felt was the sting of it when it hit me." "Maybe," said Philo Gubb eagerly, "maybe it ain't a pea-shooter. Maybe it's a twenty-two short pistol with a silencer onto it. Maybe it's only because he's been afraid to come nigh enough to you that he ain't killed you yet. It don't seem to me that any man would try to murder any one with a pea-shooter." "Humph!" said old Gabe. "Maybe you are right, at that. That's something I never thought of. It sounds likely, too."