There was the usual hotel and saloon combined, with its array of spruce bushes in tubs before the entrance. I leaned my cycle against the porch and went in to interview the landlord about a meal. Dinner was by luck just ready. I cleaned off some of the grime of my ride and wandered into the commercial room, which was garnished with horsehair furniture, a mildewed engraving of Washington, and two plates of sticky fly-paper, buzzing and noxious, set out on the soiled tablecloth. There was one other midday guest, a young man in a gray suit who sat watching the struggles of the latest addition to the fly-paper colony while he waited for dinner. I placed him immediately as a newspaper man, and the first dozen words we exchanged, as I took my place opposite to him at the table, proved me right. He had been sent down on the trial of one of those dull and elusive scandals which serve to lighten the papers during the dead season, and had to put in two hours' waiting for his train back to the city. He had a considerable fund of anecdote which needed only the barest encouragement to set going, and he transferred his interest from the fly-paper to myself with complimentary promptitude. He had a trick of raising his voice a full three tones at the beginning of each sentence, and as his dissertations were lengthy I found myself speculating at to what new and rasping height his voice might next reach. There was a week-old copy of a local paper lying on the table, and in a pause of the meal he pushed it over to me. "There's a thing that might interest you, being a cyclist," he said. "What do you make of that kind of an accident?" I read the paragraph he pointed out. It was the account of an inquest held on the body of a young man identified as one George Powell, salesman in a Philadelphia dry-goods store. He had been found on a stretch of road a few miles beyond Coopersville by a farmer taking an early load of milk to the Coopersville creamery. The handle-bars and front part of his wheel, near by, were damaged, and the broken lamp was picked up a few yards further on. The man was dead, but the curious part, which had evidently struck my acquaintance also, was that there were no injuries found on the body except a single diagonal scratch across the face, which was of sufficient depth to have destroyed one eye and to lay the entire cheek open. This in itself had not produced death, and the coroner's autopsy had revealed no symptom of concussion. The medical officer's verdict had been death from heart failure. The injuries suggested attack, but there had been no robbery, and though the man's clothing was torn his pockets were apparently untouched. They contained thirty-five dollars in notes, in a pocket-book, some small change, and the papers that had led to his identification. "Well?" said my acquaintance. "It looks queer." He laid a finger on the paragraph.