Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly
in the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so
incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying
there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity
to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him
with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only
stare at it blankly.

"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"

Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have seemed
a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but presently he
became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand protruding from
the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way and half hidden
by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of cast-off trousers but
for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles to the sky. It was
a dead man. So palpably dead that life seemed to have taken flight from
his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and degraded by them that the
naked subject of a dissecting table would have been less insulting to
humanity. The head had fallen back, and was partly hidden in a gopher
burrow, but the white, upturned face and closed eyes had less of
helpless death in them than those wretched enwrappings. Indeed, one limp
hand that lay across the swollen abdomen lent itself to the grotesquely
hideous suggestion of a gentleman sleeping off the excesses of a hearty
dinner.

"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"

Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded