The old man sat erect and quietly laid
hold of the revolver.
Bang!
Like a body cut from the gallows the Chinaman
plumped into the black hole below, carrying his tail
in his teeth. The trap-door turned over, shutting
down with a snap. The swarthy little gentleman
from San Francisco sprang nimbly from his perch,
caught something in the air with his hat, as a boy
catches a butterfly, and vanished into the chimney as
if drawn up by suction.
From away somewhere in the outer darkness
floated in through the open door a faint, far cry--a
long, sobbing wail, as of a child death-strangled in
the desert, or a lost soul borne away by the Adver-
sary. It may have been the coyote.
In the early days of the following spring a party
of miners on their way to new diggings passed along
the gulch, and straying through the deserted shanties
found in one of them the body of Hiram Beeson,
stretched upon a bunk, with a bullet hole through
the heart. The ball had evidently been fired from
the opposite side of the room, for in one of the oaken
beams overhead was a shallow blue dint, where it
had struck a knot and been deflected downward to
the breast of its victim. Strongly attached to the same
beam was what appeared to be an end of a rope of
braided horsehair, which had been cut by the bullet
in its passage to the knot. Nothing else of interest
was noted, excepting a suit of mouldy and incongru-
ous clothing, several articles of which were after-
ward identified by respectable witnesses as those in
which certain deceased citizen's of Deadman's had
been buried years before.
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