as regards the code. And you wish me to defend you?"

The stranger's gloomy expression of astonishment now turned to blank
hopelessness.

"I knew you didn't understand," he said, despairingly. "Why, all THAT
was TWO YEARS AGO. It's all settled and done and gone. The jury found
for me at the inquest. It ain't THAT I want to see you about. It's
something arising out of it."

"Ah," said the Colonel, affably, "a vendetta, perhaps. Some friend or
relation of his taken up the quarrel?"

The stranger looked abstractedly at Starbottle. "You think a relation
might; or would feel in that sort of way?"

"Why, blank it all, sir," said the Colonel, "nothing is more common.
Why, in '52 one of my oldest friends, Doctor Byrne, of St. Jo, the
seventh in a line from old General Byrne, of St. Louis, was killed,
sir, by Pinkey Riggs, seventh in a line from Senator Riggs, of Kentucky.
Original cause, sir, something about a d----d roasting ear, or a blank
persimmon in 1832; forty-seven men wiped out in twenty years. Fact,
sir."

"It ain't that," said the stranger, moving hesitatingly in his chair.
"If it was anything of that sort I wouldn't mind,--it might bring
matters to a wind-up, and I shouldn't have to come here and have this
cursed talk with you."

It was so evident that this frank and unaffected expression of some