the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly, lying in a ditch
under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at the door of a
neighbour, screaming and calling for help.

The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
the corner, back of the stove in Wildman's and appeared on the street. Men
ran from store to store and from group to group along the street saying
that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On a street
corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the men of
Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the murderer
to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert's livery,
appeared on Main Street. "He will be at the McCarthy farm," he shouted.
When several men, coming out of Geiger's drug store, stopped the marshal's
horse, saying, "You will have trouble out there; you had better take
help," the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg laughed. "What
trouble?" he asked--"To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask him to come and he
will come. The rest of that lot won't cut any figure. Mike can wrap the
entire McCarthy family around his finger."

There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen men
who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town's social
touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there in that fat,
corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about
it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage
dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn
farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in
Nature."

The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the