Beyond that one statement which had produced such
a curious effect, Lite did not have anything to say that
shed the faintest light upon the matter. He told where
he had been, and that he had discovered the body just
before Jean arrived, and that he had immediately
started with her to town. The coroner did not cross-
question him. Counting from four o'clock, which Jim
had already named as the time of their separation, Lite
would have had just about time to do the things he
testified to doing. The only thing he claimed to have
done and could not possibly have done, was to see Aleck
Douglas riding into the coulee. Aleck himself had
branded that a lie before Lite had ever uttered it.

The result was just what was to be expected. Aleck
Douglas was placed under arrest, and as a prisoner he
rode back to town alongside the sheriff,--an old friend
of his, by the way,--to where Jean waited impatiently
for news.

It was Lite who told her. "It'll come out all right,"
he said, in his calm way that might hide a good deal of
emotion beneath it. "It's just to have something to
work from,--don't mean anything in particular. It's
a funny way the law has got," he explained, "of
arresting the last man that saw a fellow alive, or the first
one that sees him dead."

Jean studied this explanation dolefully. "They
ought to find out the last one that saw him alive," she