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"'I mean to ride into the plaza at Santa Fé, hitch my horse in front of the palace, and put a bullet through Lew Wallace.'

"These are his words. One of my friends warned me to close the shutters at evening, so the bright light of the student lamp might not make such a shining mark of the governor writing until late upon 'Ben Hur.'"

Mrs. Wallace's picture of the author sitting by the open window of the palace working upon his book late into the night under the light of the lamp with the vague menace of Billy the Kid's six-shooter out in the darkness of Santa Fé's silent streets is singularly interesting and adds a touch of romance to the history of the novel whose fame was soon to fill the world. What if the Kid had made good his threat and his bullet had come out of the night to stay the hand of the writer? Where, then, would have been "Ben Hur," and how much pleasure would have been denied to millions of men and women in the reading of it?

Mrs. McSween was not a woman to sit and weep over her misfortunes. She had the courage of her hatreds and faith in a God of vengeance. The refusal of Colonel Dudley to interfere when he could have done so rankled in her soul and, carrying out the threat she had hurled at that officer, she now left no stone unturned to shoulder upon him the responsibility for the crime that had widowed her and left her homeless. In elaborate affidavits, she laid her case not only before Governor Wallace but before the authorities at Washington. The governor, it is said, favoured prosecution, but the attorney-general of the territory decided that the courts had no jurisdiction.

When it seemed that some official action was inevitable, Colonel Dudley himself demanded an investigation. Under warrant of the War Department, a military court