found."
It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met
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
curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the
helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown
paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt collar, and matted hair, proved
the only record.
"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to
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