A small part of the old plantation, heavily mortgaged, still belonged to Shep and was rented by him to a tenant, Jess Munro. He announced one day that he was going to collect the rent due him. Having been drinking heavily, he was in an abusive frame of mind. As it chanced he met young Hal Yarnell, just going into the office of his kinsman Dick Bellamy, with whom he was about to arrange the details of a hunting trip they were starting upon. Shep emptied his spleen on the boy, harking back to the old feud and threatening vengeance at their next meeting. The boy was white with rage, but he shut his teeth and passed upstairs without saying a word.
The body of Shep Boone was found next day by Munro among the blackberry bushes at the fence corner of his own place. No less than four witnesses had seen young Yarnell pass that way with a rifle in his hand about the same time that Shep 194 was riding out from town. They had heard a shot, but had thought little of it. Munro had been hoeing cotton in the field and had seen the lad as he passed. Later he had heard excited voices, and presently a shot. Other circumstantial evidence wound a net around the boy. He was arrested. Before the coroner held an inquest a new development startled the community. Dick Bellamy fled on a night train, leaving a note to the coroner exonerating Hal. In it he practically admitted the crime, pleading self defence.
This was the story that Ferne Yarnell told in the parlor of the Palace Hotel to Jack Flatray and the Lees.
Melissy spoke first. “Did Mr. Bellamy kill the man to keep your brother from being killed?”
“I don’t know. It must have been that. It’s all so horrible.”
The deputy’s eyes gleamed. “Think of it another way, Miss Yarnell. Bellamy was up against it. Your brother is only a boy. He took his place. A friend couldn’t have done more for another.”
The color beat into the face of the Arkansas girl as she looked at him. “No. He sacrificed his career for him. He did a thing he must have hated to do.”
“He’s sure some man,” Flatray pronounced.
A young man, slight, quick of step, and erect as a willow sapling, walked into the room. He looked 195 from one to another with clear level eyes. Miss Ferne introduced him as her brother.
A thought crossed the mind of the deputy. Perhaps this boy had killed his enemy after all and Bellamy had shouldered the blame for him. If the mine owner were in love with Ferne Yarnell this was a hypothesis more than possible. In either case he acquitted the slayer of blame. In his pocket was a letter from the sheriff at Nemo, Arkansas, stating that his county was well rid of Shep Boone and that the universal opinion was that neither Bellamy nor young Yarnell had been to blame for the outcome of the difficulty. Unless there came to him an active demand for the return of Bellamy he intended to let sleeping dogs lie.