"Are they, Bud?" asked Anderson in quick alarm.
"Sure," replied Bud with a mighty swelling of the chest. Even Blootch envied him.
"She's been dead jest an hour an' seven minutes," observed Anderson, gingerly touching the dead woman's wrist. "Doggone, I'm glad o' one thing!"
"What's that, Anderson?"
"We won't have to set her hip. Saved expense."
"But we'll have to bury her, like as not," said Isaac Porter.
"Yes," said Anderson reflectively. "She'll have to be buried. But—but—" and here his face lightened up in relief—"not fer a day er two; so what's the use worryin'."
When the coroner arrived, soon after six o'clock, a jury was empanelled and witnesses sworn. In ten minutes a verdict of suicide was returned and the coroner was on his way back to Boggs City. He did not even know that a hip had been dislocated. Anderson insisted upon a post-mortem examination, but was laughed out of countenance by the officious M.D.
"I voted fer that fool last November," said Anderson wrathfully, as the coroner drove off, "but you c'n kick the daylights out of me if I ever do it ag'in. Look out there, Bud! What in thunder are you doin' with them pistols? Doggone, ain't you got no sense? Pointin' 'em around that way. Why, you're liable to shoot somebody—"
"Aw, them ain't pistols," scoffed Bud, his mouth full of something. "They're bologny sausages. I ain't had nothin' to eat sence last night and I'm hungry."