is most often calculated, not upon the crime itself, but upon how the
thing is done.

In Askatoon, no one would have been greatly shocked if, when Orlando
Guise and Joel Mazarine met at the railway-station or in the main street,
Orlando had killed Mazarine.

Mazarine would have been dead in either case; and he would have been
killed by another hand in either case; but the attitude of the public
would not have been the same in either case. The public would have
considered the killing of Mazarine before the eyes of the world as
justifiable homicide; its dislike of the man would have induced it to
add the word justifiable.

But that Joel Mazarine should be killed by night without an audience,
secretly--however righteously--shocked the people of Askatoon.

Had they seen the thing done, there would have been sensation, but no
mystery; but night, secrecy, distance, mystery, all begot, not a reaction
in Mazarine's favour, but a protest against the thing being done under
cover, as it were, unhelped by popular observation. Also, to the
Askatoon mind, that one man should kill another in open quarrel was
courageous, or might be courageous,--but for one man to kill another,
whoever that other was, in a hidden way, was a barbarian business.

It seemed impossible to have any doubt as to who killed the man, though
Orlando had not waited a moment after the body had been brought to
Tralee, but had gone straight to the police, and told what had happened,
so far as he knew it. He stated the exact facts.