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 moldy and incongruous clothing, several
articles of which were afterward identified by respectable witnesses
as those in which certain deceased citizens of Deadman's had been
buried years before. But it is not easy to understand how that could
be, unless, indeed, the garments had been worn as a disguise by Death
himself--which is hardly credible.



BEYOND THE WALL



Many years ago, on my way from Hongkong to New York, I assed a week
in San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I had been in that
city, during which my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my
hope; I was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew
my friendship with such of the companions of my youth as still lived
and remembered me with the old affection. Chief of these, I hoped,
was Mohun Dampier, an old schoolmate with whom I had held a desultory