you know, and one or two of ’em is belled. And he kept on followin’ after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that’s near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it—this body.

“But, suh, squire, it wasn’t no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck—that’s what it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Bell Buzzard he’s come back agin and is hangin’ round. They tell me he ain’t been seen round here sence the year of the yellow fever—I don’t remember myself, but that’s whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say—the niggers do—that when the Belled Buzzard comes, it’s a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!”

The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea-hen. The squire didn’t heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he hearkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow’s place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his companion heard it too.

The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.

“Well, by doctors!” he cried, “if there ain’t the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day—he’s got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he’s shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that’s somethin’ you won’t see every day! In all my born days I ain’t never seen the beat of that!”

Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.

“Is he followin’ us?” asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted voice.

“Which—him?” answered the constable, still stretching his neck. “No, he’s gone now—gone off to the left—just a-zoonin’, like he’d done forgot somethin’.”

And Bristow’s place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground—those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered, and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow’s farm buildings.

The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields, and was in other respects much like the squire’s own house except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings—a barn, a smokehouse, and a corncrib—was a little peach orchard, and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of stock at this hour, with feed- racks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feed-racks.

To the front fence a dozen or more riding-horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirt sleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man’s old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were gaunt hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.

Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually travelled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it—if they noted it at all—subconsciously.