The story written by Mr. Anderson ended at this point. As printed it ended considerably in advance of this point; but at least, as he later told his wife, he had done his best to give his paper a good story. By the time his message was waiting in the hands of the station agent, telephone wires were busy between Spring Valley and other larger towns. The early afternoon papers in Columbus were on the streets by eleven-thirty with big headlines, and a few lines of type about the murder of "County Sheriff Abel Tarbush of Spring Valley, Jackson County, for which murder four tramps had been suspected and placed in jail." The deceased was described as a prominent Mason. By that time the star reporters of the morning dailies were on the through train, Number Five, bound east from Columbus to Spring Valley, as many learned by telephone; so that the arrival of Number Five this day would be a matter of special importance. Of exact details in all these matters, Don Lane knew but little. It was for reasons of his own, easily obvious, that he went down to the little station to meet the through train from the West. Anne Oglesby was coming! His mother did not accompany him, of course, and he therefore was quite alone. Of all those whom he encountered hurrying in the same direction, all those who packed the little platform and who stood here and there in groups speaking solemnly one with the other, he could count not a friend, not an acquaintance. Dully he felt that here and there an eye was turned upon him, that here and there a word was spoken about him. He dismissed it as part of the aftermath of his own troubles of the previous day. He walked nervously up and down, impatiently looking westward down the line of rails, his own contemptuous hatred for all these lost in the greater emotion that filled his heart. Anne was coming--she was almost here! And he must say good-by. Meantime, in the courthouse, there was going forward due action on the part of the officers of the law intrusted with the solution of such mysteries as this murder. The sheriff, a large and solid man, Dan Cowles by name, was one of the first to inspect the premises where the crime had been committed. Shortly after that he went over to the office of Blackman, Justice of the Peace and coroner, who by ten o'clock that morning had summoned his jury of six men--Nels Jorgens, the blacksmith; Mr. Rawlins, the minister of the Church of Christ; Ben McQuaid, the traveling man; Newman, the clothing merchant; J. B. Saunders, the Knight Templar; Jerome Westbrook, clerk in the First National Bank.