have occurred to the coroner that he knew aught of the stranger. As he stood against the batten door, the pale light from the interstices of the unchinked logs, all the grayer because it alternated with the sombre timbers, falling upon his face and figure, his hat upturned in front, revealing his brow with a forelock of straight black hair, his brilliant dark eyes, and his distinctly cut definite features, the sketch-book was swiftly passed from one to another of the jury, reluctantly relinquished here and there, and more than once eliciting half-smothered exclamations of delighted wonder from the unsophisticated mountaineers, as they glanced back and forth from the man leaning against the door to the counterfeit presentment on the paper. Constant Hite experienced a glow of vicarious pride as he remembered the satisfaction that the artist had taken in the sketch, and he wished that that still thing on the bier could know how his work, most wonderful it seemed, was appreciated. And then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he realized that it was this which had entrapped him; this bit of paper had brought him into fear and trouble and risk of his life. The man might be of the revenue force. He might have encountered other moonshiners, and thus have come to his violent death. If this were his vocation, it brought Hite into dark suspicion by virtue of the fact, known to a few of the neighborhood, that he himself was a distiller of brush whiskey. No one else had seen the stranger till the finding of the body. He gathered this from the trend of the inquiry after the formal preliminary queries. The seven men, as they sat together on a bench made by passing a plank between the logs of the wall diagonally across the corner of the room, chewed meditatively their quids of tobacco, and now and then spat profusely on the ground, their faces growing more perplexed and graver as the examination progressed. When Hite disclosed the circumstance that on the previous day he had encountered a "stranger man" near the "Witch-Face," there was a palpable sensation among them. They glanced at one another meaningly, and a sudden irritation was perceptible in the coroner's manner as he sat in a rickety chair near the improvised bier. He was a citizen of the valley region, a trifle more sophisticated than the jury, and disposed to seriously deprecate the introduction of any morbid or superstitious element into so grave a matter. He had a bald head, a lean face, the bones very clearly defined about the temple and cheek and jaw, a scanty grizzled beard; and he was dressed somewhat farmer fashion, in blue jeans, with his boots drawn high over his trousers, but with a stiffly starched white shirt,--the collar and cravat in evidence, the cuffs, however, vanished up the big sleeves of his coat. "The exact place of the meeting is not material," he said frowningly. But Hite's mercurial interest in the drawing had revived anew.