The hounds shared the boy's curiosity, and stood beside the table waving their scroll-like tails, and watching with expectant eagerness the unerring precision with which the stranger conveyed a knife-load of "frijoles" from his plate to his mouth. When he had finished his repast, gulping the last half-glass of buttermilk, and wiping the white beads from his overhanging mustache with quick horizontal sweeps of his gayly bordered handkerchief, he leaned back and flipped a bean at Ulysses, whose expression of intent and curious awe changed instantly to the most sheepish self-consciousness. The familiarity loosened his tongue, however, and he asked, with a little explosive gasp,-- "Do yuh think they'll ketch 'im?" "Ketch who?" "The man that shot gran'pap." "They've got 'im now." "Hev they? How'd they ketch 'im?" "He gave himself up." "Will they hang 'im?" The coroner's eyes twinkled. "Don't you think they'd ought to?" "You bet!" Ulysses wagged his head with bloodthirsty vehemence. The great man got up, laughing, and went toward the door, rubbing the boy's hair the wrong way as he passed him. The hounds followed languidly, and Ulysses darted up the creaking staircase, and tumbled into the little attic room where Melissa sat gazing drearily out of the window. "They've got 'im!'" he said breathlessly. "They're a-go'n' to hang 'im!" The girl got up and backed toward the wall, gasping and dizzy. "Who said so?" she faltered. "The man downstairs,--the one that came from Loss Anglus." Melissa put the palms of her outstretched hands against the wall behind her to steady herself. In the half-light she seemed crowding away from some terror that confronted her. "I don't believe it. They won't do anything to him right away; it wouldn't be fair. They don't know what paw done. I"-- Her voice broke. She looked about piteously, biting her lip and trying to remember what she had said. Ulysses was not a critical listener. He had enjoyed his little sensation, and was ready for another. From the talk downstairs he knew that Sterling had acknowledged the killing to the men at the camp. His excitement made him indifferent as to the source of Melissa's information. "I'm go'n' to the hangin'," he said, doggedly boastful. Melissa looked at him vacantly. "How'd they find out who done it?" she asked, dropping her hands and turning toward the window. "He told it hisself,--blabbed it right out to the men at the camp; then he went on down to Loss Anglus, big as life, an' blowed about it there. He's cheeky." Melissa turned on him with a flash of contempt. "You said they ketched him." The boy felt his importance as the bearer of sensational tidings ebbing away. "I don't care," he replied sullenly. "They'll hang 'im, anyway: the cor'ner said so." He clutched his throat with his thumbs and forefingers, thrusting out his tongue and rolling his eyes in blood-curdling pantomime.