Chapter II

There was an outrage. As none of the tenantry had the most remote notion of shooting Mr. Phlynn, Mr. Phlynn shot himself--at least, he shot his own hat. There were many obvious advantages in Phineas taking this horrible task upon himself. Of course, the chief of these was the fact that if any desperate tenant had sought to make a target of Mr. Phlynn’s hat, he wouldn’t have paused to ascertain whether Mr. Phlynn’s head was in it or not--really, he might have preferred that the hat should be so tenanted. A circumstance of that sort would have been decidedly inconvenient. With Mr. Phlynn as the assailant of his own hat, no such objectionable mistake was possible. Mr. Phlynn carefully placed the hat on the roadside between his own residence and the nearest police barrack, and fired at it twice. One ball ripped the front rim off and the other tore a hole in the crown. Then carefully replacing his dilapidated head-gear upon his undisturbed cranium, he flung his revolver into the adjacent ditch and rushed breathless into the presence of the sub-inspector in the police barrack aforementioned, and poured into the astonished ears of that horrified luminary a ghastly story of his terrible encounter with a band of four masked miscreants, who had fired at least a dozen times at him, two balls actually grazing his head, in proof of which, behold the battered hat!