"Sure!" they echoed. "You have shown it yourself, Abner."
"No," replied my uncle, "I have not shown it. I have shown merely whither circumstantial evidence leads us when we go hotfoot after a theory. Bowers says that there was a man on the hill above Daniel Coopman's house, and this man will know that he did not kill Daniel Coopman and that his story is the truth."
They laughed in my uncle's face.
"Do you believe that there was any such person?"
My uncle seemed to increase in stature, and his voice became big and dominant.
"I do," he said, "because I am the man!"
They had got their lesson, and we rode out with Shifflet and Twiggs to a legal trial.
