"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel Gaylord was not a chance nigger. There was no chance about it. Colonel Gaylord killed himself. He committed suicide--as truly as if he had blown out his brains with a gun. He did it with his uncontrollable temper. The man was an egoist. He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as of supreme importance. He has tried to crush the life and spirit and independence from everyone about him. But once too often he wreaked his anger upon an innocent person--at least upon a person that for all he knew was innocent--and at one stroke his past injustices were avenged. It was not chance that killed Colonel Gaylord. It was the inevitable law of cause and effect. 'Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his first fit of passion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this. Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him. "Oh, I've seen it a hundred times! It's character that tells. I've seen it happen to a political boss--a man whose business it was to make friends with every voter high and low. I've seen him forget, just once, and turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And I've seen that man, the most insignificant of the politician's followers, work and plot and scheme to overthrow him; and in the end succeed. The big man never knew what struck him. He thought it was luck, chance, a turn of the wheel. He never dreamed that it was his own character hitting back. I've seen it so often, I'm a fatalist. I don't believe in chance. It was Colonel Gaylord who killed himself, and he commenced it fifty years ago." "It's God's own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly. The sheriff had listened to Terry's words with an anxiously reminiscent air. I wondered if he were reviewing his own political past, to see if by chance he also had unwittingly crushed a worm. He raised his eyes to Terry's face with a gleam of admiration. "You've been pretty clever, Mr. Patten, in finding out the truth about this crime," he acknowledged generously. "But you couldn't have expected me to find out," he added, "for I didn't know any of the circumstances. I had never even heard that such a man existed as that chicken thief--and as to there being two ghosts instead of one, there wasn't a suggestion of it brought out at the inquest." Terry looked at him with his usual slowly broadening smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but he changed his mind and--with a visible effort--shut it again. "Terry," I asked, "how _did_ you find out about the chicken thief? I confess I don't understand it yet." He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.