Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet. The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other's shoulders and then backed away. For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day. The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained. Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and there was no doubt that it was his own. That also was the opinion of the coroner's jury, which walked out from its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound, inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal. Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic breasts. She stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression around the room. "Joe didn't do it, if that's what you mean," said she. "Madam--" began the coroner severely. "Yes, you little whiffet," she burst out sharply, "you're the one that put 'em up to do it! Joe didn't do it, I tell you, and you men know that as well as I do. Every one of you has knowed him all his life!" "Madam, I must ask you not to interrupt the proceedings," said the coroner. "Order in the court!" commanded the constable in his deepest official voice. "Oh, shut your fool mouth, Bill Frost!" said Mrs. Newbolt scornfully. "Never mind, Mother," counseled Joe. "I'll be all right. They have to do what they're doing, I suppose." "Yes, they're doin' what that little snip-snapper with them colored whiskers tells 'em to do!" said she.