suddenly from an alley in the dusk of the early evening, furnished them
with a theme for infinite speculation and varied conjecture; that nine
times out of ten the man said, "Hello, Shrimp!" and passed on his way
perfectly well known to the little lamplighter was a matter of not the
slightest importance. Sometimes, it is true, Mr. Shrimplin told of the
salutation, but the man was always a stranger to him, and that he should
have spoken, calling him by name, he and Custer agreed only added to the
sinister mystery of the encounter.

It was midday on that twenty-seventh of November when Mr. Shrimplin
killed Murphy of the solitary eye, and he reached the climax of the
story just as Mrs. Shrimplin began to prepare the dressing for the small
turkey that was to be the principal feature of their four-o'clock
dinner. The morning's scanty fall of snow had been so added to as time
passed that now it completely whitened the strip of brown turf in the
little side yard beyond the kitchen windows.

"I think," said Mr. Shrimplin, "we are going to see some weather. Well,
snow ain't a bad thing." His dreamy eyes rested on Custer for an
instant; they seemed to invite a question.

"No?" said Custer interrogatively.

"If I was going to murder a man, I don't reckon I'd care to do it when
there was snow on the ground."

Mrs. Shrimplin here suggested cynically that perhaps he dreaded cold
feet, but her husband ignored this. To what he felt to be the
commonplaceness of her outlook he had long since accustomed himself. He
merely said: