Now you gentlemen know that you can’t convict a person for murder unless you have got positive proof that murder’s been done—the dead body itself. Which was the case here, and that smart youth from the county seat had to let the little woman go free. So she came back to the cabin, living there as quiet as you please and minding her own precise business.
HERE is a pocket-piece I have had for some time. You can see for yourself that it is copper.
It is the thing my father made for Black Jean to wear over his bad eye. I found that piece of copper two years after the little woman died—near twelve years after Black Jean disappeared. And I found it in the ashes and stone at the bottom of the limekiln standing there, half-tumbled down.
A lot of people hereabouts say it doesn’t follow that Black Jean’s body was burned in the kiln—cremated, I guess you city chaps would call it. They can’t figure out how the mischief a little ninety-pound woman could have lugged those two bodies after she shot them with my father’s rifle, the distance from the cabin to the kiln—a good half mile and more.
They point out that the body of Black Jean must have weighed over two hundred pounds, not to mention that the other woman was big and fat. But they make me weary.
It is as simple as the nose on your face: The big one-eyed bear did the job for her!
THE GRAVE
A Story of Stark Terror
By Orville R. Emerson