On Wednesday all was changed.  From the town of Nolan, eight miles away, came a story which put a quite different light on the matter.  Nolan consisted of a school house, a blacksmith’s shop, a “store” and a half-dozen dwellings.  The store was kept by one Henry Odell, a cousin of the elder May.  On the afternoon of the Sunday of May’s disappearance Mr. Odell and four of his neighbors, men of credibility, were sitting in the store smoking and talking.  It was a warm day; and both the front and the back door were open.  At about three o’clock Charles May, who was well known to three of them, entered at the front door and passed out at the rear.  He was without hat or coat.  He did not look at them, nor return their greeting, a circumstance which did not surprise, for he was evidently seriously hurt.  Above the left eyebrow was a wound—­a deep gash from which the blood flowed, covering the whole left side of the face and neck and saturating his light-gray shirt.  Oddly enough, the thought uppermost in the minds of all was that he had been fighting and was going to the brook directly at the back of the store, to wash himself.

Perhaps there was a feeling of delicacy—­a backwoods etiquette which restrained them from following him to offer assistance; the court records, from which, mainly, this narrative is drawn, are silent as to anything but the fact.  They waited for him to return, but he did not return.

Bordering the brook behind the store is a forest extending for six miles back to the Medicine Lodge Hills.  As soon as it became known in the neighborhood of the missing man’s dwelling that he had been seen in Nolan there was a marked alteration in public sentiment and feeling.  The vigilance committee went out of existence without the formality of a resolution.  Search along the wooded bottom lands of May Creek was stopped and nearly the entire male population of the region took to beating the bush about Nolan and in the Medicine Lodge Hills.  But of the missing man no trace was found.

One of the strangest circumstances of this strange case is the formal indictment and trial of a man for murder of one whose body no human being professed to have seen—­one not known to be dead.  We are all more or less familiar with the vagaries and eccentricities of frontier law, but this instance, it is thought, is unique.  However that may be, it is of record that on recovering from his illness John May was indicted for the murder of his missing father.  Counsel for the defense appears not to have demurred and the case was tried on its merits.  The prosecution was spiritless and perfunctory; the defense easily established—­with regard to the deceased—­an alibi.  If during the time in which John May must have killed Charles May, if he killed him at all, Charles May was miles away from where John May must have been, it is plain that the deceased must have come to his death at the hands of someone else.