CHAPTER VIIDELIVERANCE

114CHAPTER VIIDELIVERANCE

Joe, stunned by the sudden tragedy, stood for a moment as he had stopped when he laid his hand on Isom’s shoulder. Ollie, on the other side of the fallen man, leaned over and peered into his face.In that moment a wild turmoil of hopes and fears leaped in her hot brain. Was it deliverance, freedom? Or was it only another complication of shame and disgrace? Was he dead, slain by his own hand in the baseness of his own heart? Or was he only hurt, to rise up again presently with revilings and accusations, to make the future more terrible than the past. Did this end it; did this come in answer to her prayers for a bolt to fall on him and wither him in his tracks?Even in that turgid moment, when she turned these speculations, guilty hopes, wild fears, in her mind, Isom’s eyelids quivered, dropped; and the sounding breath in his nostrils ceased.Isom Chase lay dead upon the floor. In the crook of his elbow rested a little time-fingered canvas bag, one corner of which had broken open in his fall, out of which poured the golden gleanings of his hard and bitter years.On the planks beneath his shoulder-blades, where his feet had come and gone for forty years, all leached and whitened by the strong lye of countless scrubbings at the hands of the old wife and the new, his blood ran down in a little stream. It gathered in a cupped and hollowed plank, and stood there in a little pool, glistening, black. His wife saw her white face reflected in it as she raised up from peering into his blank, dead eyes.115“Look at his blood!” said she, hoarsely whispering. “Look at it–look at it!”“Isom! Isom!” called Joe softly, a long pause between his words, as if summoning a sleeper. He stooped over, touching Isom’s shoulder.There was a trickle of blood on Isom’s beard, where the rifle ball had struck him in the throat; back of his head that vital stream was wasting, enlarging the pool in the hollowed plank near Ollie’s foot.“He’s dead!” she whispered.Again, in a flash, that quick feeling of lightness, almost joyful liberty, lifted her. Isom was dead, dead! What she had prayed for had fallen. Cruel, hard-palmed Isom, who had gripped her tender throat, was dead there on the floor at her feet! Dead by his own act, in the anger of his loveless heart.“I’m afraid he is,” said Joe, dazed and aghast.The night wind came in through the open door and vexed the lamp with harassing breath. Its flame darted like a serpent’s tongue, and Joe, fearful that it might go out and leave them in the dark with that bleeding corpse, crossed over softly and closed the door.Ollie stood there, her hands clenched at her sides, no stirring of pity in her heart for her husband with the stain of blood upon his harsh, gray beard. In that moment she was supremely selfish. The possibility of accusation or suspicion in connection with his death did not occur to her. She was too shallow to look ahead to that unpleasant contingency. The bright lure of liberty was in her eyes; it was dancing in her brain. As she looked at Joe’s back the moment he stood with hand on the door, her one thought was:“Will he tell?”Joe came back and stood beside the lifeless form of Isom, looking down at him for a moment, pity and sorrow in his116face. Then he tiptoed far around the body and took up his hat from the floor where it had fallen in Isom’s scramble for the sack of gold.“What are we going to do?” asked Ollie, suddenly afraid.“I’ll go after the doctor, but he can’t help him any,” said Joe. “I’ll wake up the Greenings as I go by and send some of them over to stay with you.”“Don’t leave me here with it–don’t leave me!” begged Ollie. “I can’t stay here in the house with it alone!”She shrank away from her husband’s body, unlovely in death as he had been unloved in life, and clung to Joe’s arm.But a little while had passed since Isom fell–perhaps not yet five minutes–but someone had heard the shot, someone was coming, running, along the hard path between gate and kitchen door. Ollie started.“Listen!” she said. “They’re coming! What will you say?”“Go upstairs,” he commanded, pushing her toward the door, harshness in his manner and words. “It’ll not do for you to be found here all dressed up that way.”“What will you tell them–what will you say?” she insisted, whispering.“Go upstairs; let me do the talking,” he answered, waving her away.A heavy foot struck the porch, a heavy hand beat a summons on the door. Ollie’s white dress gleamed a moment in the dark passage leading to the stairs, the flying end of her veil glimmered.“Come in,” called Joe.Sol Greening, their neighbor, whose gate was almost opposite Isom’s, whose barn was not eighty rods from the kitchen door, stood panting in the lamplight, his heavy beard lifting and falling on his chest.117“What–what’s happened–who was that shootin’–Isom! God A’mighty, is he hurt?”“Dead,” said Joe dully, standing hat in hand. He looked dazedly at the excited man in the door, whose mouth was open as he stared fearfully at the corpse.“How? Who done it?” asked Greening, coming in on tiptoe, his voice lowered to a whisper, in the cautious fashion of people who move in the vicinity of the sound-sleeping dead. The tread of living man never more would disturb old Isom Chase, but Sol Greening moved as silently as a blowing leaf.“Who done it?” he repeated.“He did,” answered Joe.“Hedone it!” repeated Greening, looking from the rifle, still clutched in Isom’s hand, to the gold in the crook of his arm, and from that to Joe’s blanched face. “Hedone it!”“Jerking down the gun,” explained Joe, pointing to the broken rack.“Jerkin’ down the gun! What’d he want–look–look at all that money! The sack’s busted–it’s spillin’ all over him!”“He’s dead,” said Joe weakly, “and I was going after the doctor.”“Stone dead,” said Greening, bending over the body; “they ain’t a puff of breath left in him. The doctor couldn’t do him no good, Joe, but I reckon––”Greening straightened up and faced Joe, sternly.“Where’s Missis Chase?” he asked.“Upstairs,” said Joe, pointing.“Doessheknow? Who was here when it happened?”“Isom and I,” said Joe.“God A’mighty!” said Greening, looking at Joe fearfully, “just you and him?”“We were alone,” said Joe, meeting Greening’s eyes unfalteringly. “We had some words, and Isom lost his temper.118He jumped for the gun and I tried to stop him, but he jerked it by the barrel and the hammer caught.”“Broke his neck,” said Greening, mouth and eyes wide open; “broke it clean! Where’d that money come from?”“I don’t know,” said Joe; “I didn’t see it till he fell.”“Words!” said Greening, catching at it suddenly, as if what Joe had said had only then penetrated his understanding. “You and him had some words!”“Yes, we had some words,” said Joe.“Where’s Missis Chase?” demanded Greening again, turning his eyes suspiciously around the room.“Upstairs, I told you Sol,” replied Joe. “She went to bed early.”“Hush!” cautioned Greening, holding up his hand, listening intently. “I hear her movin’ around. Let me talk to her.”He tiptoed to the door at the foot of the stairs, and listened again; tiptoed back to the outer portal, which he had left swinging behind him, and closed it gently. There was no sound from above now to indicate that Ollie was awake. Sol stood near Isom’s body, straining and listening, his hand to his ear.“She must ’a’ been turnin’ over in bed,” said he. “Well, I guess I’ll have to call her. I hate to do it, but she’s got to be told.”“Yes, she must be told,” said Joe.Sol stood as if reflecting on it a little while. Joe was on the other side of Isom’s body, near the table. Both of them looked down into his bloodless face.“You had words!” said Greening, looking sternly at Joe. “What about?”“It was a matter between him and me, Sol, it don’t concern anybody else,” said Joe in a manner of dignity and reserve that was blunter than his words. Sol was not impressed119by this implied rebuke, and hint to mind his own business.“That ain’t no answer,” said he.“Well, it will have to do for you, Sol,” said Joe.“I don’t know about that,” declared Sol. “If you can’t give me the straight of it, in plain words, I’ll have to take you up.”Joe stood thoughtfully silent a little while. Then he raised his head and looked at Sol steadily.“If there’s any arresting to be done–” he began, but checked himself abruptly there, as if he had reconsidered what he started to say. “Hadn’t we better pick Isom up off the floor?” he suggested.“No, no; don’t touch him,” Greening interposed hurriedly. “Leave him lay for the coroner; that’s the law.”“All right.”“I’ll have to tell Missis Chase before we go,” said Sol.“Yes, you must tell her,” Joe agreed.Sol rapped on the woodwork of the wall at the bottom of the stairs with his big knuckles. The sound rose sudden and echoing in the house. Ollie was heard opening her door.“Missis Chase–oh, Missis Chase!” called Greening.“Who’s that, who’s that?” came Ollie’s voice, tremulous and frightened, little above a whisper, from above.“It’s Sol Greening. Don’t come down here, don’t come down!”“What was that noise? It sounded like a gun,” said Ollie, a bit nearer the head of the stairs, her words broken and disjointed.“Something’s happened, something mighty bad,” said Sol. “You stay right where you are till I send the old woman over to you–do you hear me?–stay right there!”“Oh, what is it, what is it?” moaned Ollie. “Joe–where’s Joe? Call him, Mr. Greening, call Joe!”120“He’s here,” Sol assured her, his voice full of portent “he’s goin’ away with me for a little while. I tell you it’s terrible, you must stay right up there.”“Oh, I’m so afraid–I’m so afraid!” said Ollie, coming nearer.“Go back! Go back!” commanded Greening.“If you’ll only stick to it that way,” thought Joe as Ollie’s moans sounded in his ears.“Was it robbers–is somebody hurt?” she asked.“Yes, somebody’s hurt, and hurt bad,” said Greening, “but you can’t do no good by comin’ down here. You stay right there till the old woman comes over; it’ll only be a minute.”“Let me go with you. Oh, Mr. Greening, don’t leave me here alone!” she implored.“There’s nothing to hurt you, Ollie,” said Joe. “You do as Sol tells you and stay here. Go to your room and shut the door, and wait till Mrs. Greening comes.”Sol leaned into the staircase and listened until he heard her door close. Then he turned and shut the kitchen window and the door leading into the body of the house, leaving the burning lamp on the table to keep watch over Isom and his money.“We’ll go out the front way,” said Sol to Joe. “Nothing must be touched in that room till the coroner orders it. Now, don’t you try to dodge me, Joe.”“I’ve got no reason to want to dodge any man,” said Joe.“Well, for your own sake, as well as your old mother’s, I hope to God you ain’t!” said Sol. “But this here thing looks mighty bad for somebody, Joe. I’m goin’ to take you over to Bill Frost’s and turn you over to the law.”Joe made no comment, but led the way around the house. At the kitchen window Greening laid a restraining hand on Joe’s shoulder and stopped him, while he looked in at the corpse of Isom Chase.121“Him and me, we served on the same jury this afternoon,” said Sol, nodding toward the window as he turned away. “I rode to overtake him on the way home, but he had the start of me; and I was just goin’ in the gate when I heard that shot. I poled right over here. On the same jury, and now he’s dead!”As they approached the gate Joe looked back, the events of the past few minutes and the shock of the tragedy, which had fallen as swift as a lightning stroke, stunning him out of his usual cool reasoning.There lay the house, its roof white in the moonlight, a little stream of yellow coming through the kitchen window, striking the lilac-bushes and falling brokenly on the grass beyond. There was reality in that; but in this whirl of events which crowded his mind there was no tangible thing to lay hold upon.That Isom was dead on the kitchen floor seemed impossible and unreal, like an event in a dream which one struggles against the terror of, consoling himself, yet not convincingly, as he fights its sad illusions, with the argument that it is nothing but a vision, and that with waking it will pass away.What was this awful thing with which Sol Greening had charged him, over which the whole neighborhood soon must talk and conjecture?Murder!There was no kinder word. Yet the full terror of its meaning was not over him, for his senses still swirled and felt numb in the suddenness of the blow. He had not meant that this accusation should fasten upon him when he sent Ollie from the room; he had not thought that far ahead. His one concern was that she should not be found there, dressed and ready to go, and the story of her weakness and folly given heartlessly to the world.And Curtis Morgan–where was he, the man to blame for122all this thing? Not far away, thought Joe, driving that white road in security, perhaps, even that very hour, while he, who had stood between him and his unholy desires, was being led away by Sol Greening like a calf in a rope. They were going to charge him with the murder of Isom Chase and take him away to jail.How far would Morgan permit them to go? Would he come forward to bear his share of it, or would he skulk away like a coward and leave him, the bondman, to defend the name of his dead master’s wife at the cost of his own honor and liberty, perhaps his life?All that had gone before Isom threw his life away in that moment of blind anger, must be laid bare if he was to free himself of the shadow of suspicion. It was not the part of an honorable man to seek his own comfort and safety at the cost of a woman’s name, no matter how unworthy he knew her to be, while that name and fame still stood flawless before the world. In the absence of some other avenue to vindication, a gentleman must suffer in silence, even to death. It would be cruel, unjust, and hard to bear, but that was the only way. He wondered if Ollie understood.But there were certain humiliations and indignities which a gentleman could not bend his neck to; and being led away by an inferior man like Sol Greening to be delivered up, just as if he thought that he might have run away if given an opening, was one of them. Sol had passed on through the open gate, which he had not stopped to close when he ran in, before he noticed that Joe was not following. He looked back. Joe was standing inside the fence, his arms folded across his chest.“Come on here!” ordered Sol.“No, I’m not going any farther with you, Sol,” said Joe quietly. “If there’s any arresting to be done, I guess I can do it myself.”123Greening was a self-important man in his small-bore way, who saw in this night’s tragedy fine material for increasing his consequence, at least temporarily, in that community. The first man on the bloody scene, the man to shut up the room for the coroner, the man to make the arrest and deliver the murderer to the constable–all within half an hour. It was a distinction which Greening did not feel like yielding.“Come on here, I tell you!” he commanded again.“If you want to get on your horse and go after Bill, I’ll wait right here till he comes,” said Joe; “but I’ll not go any farther with you. I didn’t shoot Isom, Sol, and you know it. If you don’t want to go after Bill, then I’ll go on over there alone and tell him what’s happened. If he wants to arrest me then, he can do it.”Seeing that by this arrangement much of his glory would get away from him, Greening stepped forward and reached out his hand, as if to compel submission. Joe lifted his own hand to intercept it with warning gesture.“No, don’t you touch me, Sol!” he cautioned.Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe’s subdued, calm warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil. Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy, fetching and carrying in Isom Chase’s barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border strife, for spitting on his boot.“Will you go, or shall I?” asked Joe.Greening made a show of considering it a minute.“Well, Joe, you go on over and tell him yourself,” said he, putting on the front of generosity and confidence, “I know you won’t run off.”124“If I had anything to run off for, I’d go as quick as anybody, I guess,” said Joe.“I’ll go and fetch the old lady over to keep company with Mrs. Chase,” said Sol, hurriedly striking across the road.Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the fields.Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned into the highroad, lashing the animal with the halter, and galloped away to summon Constable Bill Frost.Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over which the perfumes of autumn were blowing–the spices of goldenrod and ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men’s summer toil.Isom Chase was dead; stark, white, with blood upon his beard.There a dog barked, far away, raising a ripple on the placid night; there a cock crowed, and there another caught his cry; it passed on, on, fading away eastward, traveling125like an alarm, like a spreading wave, until it spent itself against the margin of breaking day.Isom Chase was dead, with an armful of gold upon his breast.Aye, Isom Chase was dead. Back there in the still house his limbs were stiffening upon his kitchen floor. Isom Chase was dead on the eve of the most bountiful harvest his lands had yielded him in all his toil-freighted years. Dead, with his fields around him; dead, with the maize dangling heavy ears in the white moonlight; dead, with the gold of pumpkin lurking like unminted treasure in the margin of his field. Dead, with fat cattle in his pastures, fat swine in his confines, sleek horses in his barn-stalls, fat cockerels on his perch; dead, with a young wife shrinking among the shadows above his cold forehead, her eyes unclouded by a tear, her panting breast undisturbed by a sigh of pity or of pain.

Joe, stunned by the sudden tragedy, stood for a moment as he had stopped when he laid his hand on Isom’s shoulder. Ollie, on the other side of the fallen man, leaned over and peered into his face.

In that moment a wild turmoil of hopes and fears leaped in her hot brain. Was it deliverance, freedom? Or was it only another complication of shame and disgrace? Was he dead, slain by his own hand in the baseness of his own heart? Or was he only hurt, to rise up again presently with revilings and accusations, to make the future more terrible than the past. Did this end it; did this come in answer to her prayers for a bolt to fall on him and wither him in his tracks?

Even in that turgid moment, when she turned these speculations, guilty hopes, wild fears, in her mind, Isom’s eyelids quivered, dropped; and the sounding breath in his nostrils ceased.

Isom Chase lay dead upon the floor. In the crook of his elbow rested a little time-fingered canvas bag, one corner of which had broken open in his fall, out of which poured the golden gleanings of his hard and bitter years.

On the planks beneath his shoulder-blades, where his feet had come and gone for forty years, all leached and whitened by the strong lye of countless scrubbings at the hands of the old wife and the new, his blood ran down in a little stream. It gathered in a cupped and hollowed plank, and stood there in a little pool, glistening, black. His wife saw her white face reflected in it as she raised up from peering into his blank, dead eyes.115

“Look at his blood!” said she, hoarsely whispering. “Look at it–look at it!”

“Isom! Isom!” called Joe softly, a long pause between his words, as if summoning a sleeper. He stooped over, touching Isom’s shoulder.

There was a trickle of blood on Isom’s beard, where the rifle ball had struck him in the throat; back of his head that vital stream was wasting, enlarging the pool in the hollowed plank near Ollie’s foot.

“He’s dead!” she whispered.

Again, in a flash, that quick feeling of lightness, almost joyful liberty, lifted her. Isom was dead, dead! What she had prayed for had fallen. Cruel, hard-palmed Isom, who had gripped her tender throat, was dead there on the floor at her feet! Dead by his own act, in the anger of his loveless heart.

“I’m afraid he is,” said Joe, dazed and aghast.

The night wind came in through the open door and vexed the lamp with harassing breath. Its flame darted like a serpent’s tongue, and Joe, fearful that it might go out and leave them in the dark with that bleeding corpse, crossed over softly and closed the door.

Ollie stood there, her hands clenched at her sides, no stirring of pity in her heart for her husband with the stain of blood upon his harsh, gray beard. In that moment she was supremely selfish. The possibility of accusation or suspicion in connection with his death did not occur to her. She was too shallow to look ahead to that unpleasant contingency. The bright lure of liberty was in her eyes; it was dancing in her brain. As she looked at Joe’s back the moment he stood with hand on the door, her one thought was:

“Will he tell?”

Joe came back and stood beside the lifeless form of Isom, looking down at him for a moment, pity and sorrow in his116face. Then he tiptoed far around the body and took up his hat from the floor where it had fallen in Isom’s scramble for the sack of gold.

“What are we going to do?” asked Ollie, suddenly afraid.

“I’ll go after the doctor, but he can’t help him any,” said Joe. “I’ll wake up the Greenings as I go by and send some of them over to stay with you.”

“Don’t leave me here with it–don’t leave me!” begged Ollie. “I can’t stay here in the house with it alone!”

She shrank away from her husband’s body, unlovely in death as he had been unloved in life, and clung to Joe’s arm.

But a little while had passed since Isom fell–perhaps not yet five minutes–but someone had heard the shot, someone was coming, running, along the hard path between gate and kitchen door. Ollie started.

“Listen!” she said. “They’re coming! What will you say?”

“Go upstairs,” he commanded, pushing her toward the door, harshness in his manner and words. “It’ll not do for you to be found here all dressed up that way.”

“What will you tell them–what will you say?” she insisted, whispering.

“Go upstairs; let me do the talking,” he answered, waving her away.

A heavy foot struck the porch, a heavy hand beat a summons on the door. Ollie’s white dress gleamed a moment in the dark passage leading to the stairs, the flying end of her veil glimmered.

“Come in,” called Joe.

Sol Greening, their neighbor, whose gate was almost opposite Isom’s, whose barn was not eighty rods from the kitchen door, stood panting in the lamplight, his heavy beard lifting and falling on his chest.117

“What–what’s happened–who was that shootin’–Isom! God A’mighty, is he hurt?”

“Dead,” said Joe dully, standing hat in hand. He looked dazedly at the excited man in the door, whose mouth was open as he stared fearfully at the corpse.

“How? Who done it?” asked Greening, coming in on tiptoe, his voice lowered to a whisper, in the cautious fashion of people who move in the vicinity of the sound-sleeping dead. The tread of living man never more would disturb old Isom Chase, but Sol Greening moved as silently as a blowing leaf.

“Who done it?” he repeated.

“He did,” answered Joe.

“Hedone it!” repeated Greening, looking from the rifle, still clutched in Isom’s hand, to the gold in the crook of his arm, and from that to Joe’s blanched face. “Hedone it!”

“Jerking down the gun,” explained Joe, pointing to the broken rack.

“Jerkin’ down the gun! What’d he want–look–look at all that money! The sack’s busted–it’s spillin’ all over him!”

“He’s dead,” said Joe weakly, “and I was going after the doctor.”

“Stone dead,” said Greening, bending over the body; “they ain’t a puff of breath left in him. The doctor couldn’t do him no good, Joe, but I reckon––”

Greening straightened up and faced Joe, sternly.

“Where’s Missis Chase?” he asked.

“Upstairs,” said Joe, pointing.

“Doessheknow? Who was here when it happened?”

“Isom and I,” said Joe.

“God A’mighty!” said Greening, looking at Joe fearfully, “just you and him?”

“We were alone,” said Joe, meeting Greening’s eyes unfalteringly. “We had some words, and Isom lost his temper.118He jumped for the gun and I tried to stop him, but he jerked it by the barrel and the hammer caught.”

“Broke his neck,” said Greening, mouth and eyes wide open; “broke it clean! Where’d that money come from?”

“I don’t know,” said Joe; “I didn’t see it till he fell.”

“Words!” said Greening, catching at it suddenly, as if what Joe had said had only then penetrated his understanding. “You and him had some words!”

“Yes, we had some words,” said Joe.

“Where’s Missis Chase?” demanded Greening again, turning his eyes suspiciously around the room.

“Upstairs, I told you Sol,” replied Joe. “She went to bed early.”

“Hush!” cautioned Greening, holding up his hand, listening intently. “I hear her movin’ around. Let me talk to her.”

He tiptoed to the door at the foot of the stairs, and listened again; tiptoed back to the outer portal, which he had left swinging behind him, and closed it gently. There was no sound from above now to indicate that Ollie was awake. Sol stood near Isom’s body, straining and listening, his hand to his ear.

“She must ’a’ been turnin’ over in bed,” said he. “Well, I guess I’ll have to call her. I hate to do it, but she’s got to be told.”

“Yes, she must be told,” said Joe.

Sol stood as if reflecting on it a little while. Joe was on the other side of Isom’s body, near the table. Both of them looked down into his bloodless face.

“You had words!” said Greening, looking sternly at Joe. “What about?”

“It was a matter between him and me, Sol, it don’t concern anybody else,” said Joe in a manner of dignity and reserve that was blunter than his words. Sol was not impressed119by this implied rebuke, and hint to mind his own business.

“That ain’t no answer,” said he.

“Well, it will have to do for you, Sol,” said Joe.

“I don’t know about that,” declared Sol. “If you can’t give me the straight of it, in plain words, I’ll have to take you up.”

Joe stood thoughtfully silent a little while. Then he raised his head and looked at Sol steadily.

“If there’s any arresting to be done–” he began, but checked himself abruptly there, as if he had reconsidered what he started to say. “Hadn’t we better pick Isom up off the floor?” he suggested.

“No, no; don’t touch him,” Greening interposed hurriedly. “Leave him lay for the coroner; that’s the law.”

“All right.”

“I’ll have to tell Missis Chase before we go,” said Sol.

“Yes, you must tell her,” Joe agreed.

Sol rapped on the woodwork of the wall at the bottom of the stairs with his big knuckles. The sound rose sudden and echoing in the house. Ollie was heard opening her door.

“Missis Chase–oh, Missis Chase!” called Greening.

“Who’s that, who’s that?” came Ollie’s voice, tremulous and frightened, little above a whisper, from above.

“It’s Sol Greening. Don’t come down here, don’t come down!”

“What was that noise? It sounded like a gun,” said Ollie, a bit nearer the head of the stairs, her words broken and disjointed.

“Something’s happened, something mighty bad,” said Sol. “You stay right where you are till I send the old woman over to you–do you hear me?–stay right there!”

“Oh, what is it, what is it?” moaned Ollie. “Joe–where’s Joe? Call him, Mr. Greening, call Joe!”120

“He’s here,” Sol assured her, his voice full of portent “he’s goin’ away with me for a little while. I tell you it’s terrible, you must stay right up there.”

“Oh, I’m so afraid–I’m so afraid!” said Ollie, coming nearer.

“Go back! Go back!” commanded Greening.

“If you’ll only stick to it that way,” thought Joe as Ollie’s moans sounded in his ears.

“Was it robbers–is somebody hurt?” she asked.

“Yes, somebody’s hurt, and hurt bad,” said Greening, “but you can’t do no good by comin’ down here. You stay right there till the old woman comes over; it’ll only be a minute.”

“Let me go with you. Oh, Mr. Greening, don’t leave me here alone!” she implored.

“There’s nothing to hurt you, Ollie,” said Joe. “You do as Sol tells you and stay here. Go to your room and shut the door, and wait till Mrs. Greening comes.”

Sol leaned into the staircase and listened until he heard her door close. Then he turned and shut the kitchen window and the door leading into the body of the house, leaving the burning lamp on the table to keep watch over Isom and his money.

“We’ll go out the front way,” said Sol to Joe. “Nothing must be touched in that room till the coroner orders it. Now, don’t you try to dodge me, Joe.”

“I’ve got no reason to want to dodge any man,” said Joe.

“Well, for your own sake, as well as your old mother’s, I hope to God you ain’t!” said Sol. “But this here thing looks mighty bad for somebody, Joe. I’m goin’ to take you over to Bill Frost’s and turn you over to the law.”

Joe made no comment, but led the way around the house. At the kitchen window Greening laid a restraining hand on Joe’s shoulder and stopped him, while he looked in at the corpse of Isom Chase.121

“Him and me, we served on the same jury this afternoon,” said Sol, nodding toward the window as he turned away. “I rode to overtake him on the way home, but he had the start of me; and I was just goin’ in the gate when I heard that shot. I poled right over here. On the same jury, and now he’s dead!”

As they approached the gate Joe looked back, the events of the past few minutes and the shock of the tragedy, which had fallen as swift as a lightning stroke, stunning him out of his usual cool reasoning.

There lay the house, its roof white in the moonlight, a little stream of yellow coming through the kitchen window, striking the lilac-bushes and falling brokenly on the grass beyond. There was reality in that; but in this whirl of events which crowded his mind there was no tangible thing to lay hold upon.

That Isom was dead on the kitchen floor seemed impossible and unreal, like an event in a dream which one struggles against the terror of, consoling himself, yet not convincingly, as he fights its sad illusions, with the argument that it is nothing but a vision, and that with waking it will pass away.

What was this awful thing with which Sol Greening had charged him, over which the whole neighborhood soon must talk and conjecture?

Murder!

There was no kinder word. Yet the full terror of its meaning was not over him, for his senses still swirled and felt numb in the suddenness of the blow. He had not meant that this accusation should fasten upon him when he sent Ollie from the room; he had not thought that far ahead. His one concern was that she should not be found there, dressed and ready to go, and the story of her weakness and folly given heartlessly to the world.

And Curtis Morgan–where was he, the man to blame for122all this thing? Not far away, thought Joe, driving that white road in security, perhaps, even that very hour, while he, who had stood between him and his unholy desires, was being led away by Sol Greening like a calf in a rope. They were going to charge him with the murder of Isom Chase and take him away to jail.

How far would Morgan permit them to go? Would he come forward to bear his share of it, or would he skulk away like a coward and leave him, the bondman, to defend the name of his dead master’s wife at the cost of his own honor and liberty, perhaps his life?

All that had gone before Isom threw his life away in that moment of blind anger, must be laid bare if he was to free himself of the shadow of suspicion. It was not the part of an honorable man to seek his own comfort and safety at the cost of a woman’s name, no matter how unworthy he knew her to be, while that name and fame still stood flawless before the world. In the absence of some other avenue to vindication, a gentleman must suffer in silence, even to death. It would be cruel, unjust, and hard to bear, but that was the only way. He wondered if Ollie understood.

But there were certain humiliations and indignities which a gentleman could not bend his neck to; and being led away by an inferior man like Sol Greening to be delivered up, just as if he thought that he might have run away if given an opening, was one of them. Sol had passed on through the open gate, which he had not stopped to close when he ran in, before he noticed that Joe was not following. He looked back. Joe was standing inside the fence, his arms folded across his chest.

“Come on here!” ordered Sol.

“No, I’m not going any farther with you, Sol,” said Joe quietly. “If there’s any arresting to be done, I guess I can do it myself.”123

Greening was a self-important man in his small-bore way, who saw in this night’s tragedy fine material for increasing his consequence, at least temporarily, in that community. The first man on the bloody scene, the man to shut up the room for the coroner, the man to make the arrest and deliver the murderer to the constable–all within half an hour. It was a distinction which Greening did not feel like yielding.

“Come on here, I tell you!” he commanded again.

“If you want to get on your horse and go after Bill, I’ll wait right here till he comes,” said Joe; “but I’ll not go any farther with you. I didn’t shoot Isom, Sol, and you know it. If you don’t want to go after Bill, then I’ll go on over there alone and tell him what’s happened. If he wants to arrest me then, he can do it.”

Seeing that by this arrangement much of his glory would get away from him, Greening stepped forward and reached out his hand, as if to compel submission. Joe lifted his own hand to intercept it with warning gesture.

“No, don’t you touch me, Sol!” he cautioned.

Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe’s subdued, calm warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil. Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy, fetching and carrying in Isom Chase’s barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border strife, for spitting on his boot.

“Will you go, or shall I?” asked Joe.

Greening made a show of considering it a minute.

“Well, Joe, you go on over and tell him yourself,” said he, putting on the front of generosity and confidence, “I know you won’t run off.”124

“If I had anything to run off for, I’d go as quick as anybody, I guess,” said Joe.

“I’ll go and fetch the old lady over to keep company with Mrs. Chase,” said Sol, hurriedly striking across the road.

Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the fields.

Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned into the highroad, lashing the animal with the halter, and galloped away to summon Constable Bill Frost.

Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over which the perfumes of autumn were blowing–the spices of goldenrod and ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men’s summer toil.

Isom Chase was dead; stark, white, with blood upon his beard.

There a dog barked, far away, raising a ripple on the placid night; there a cock crowed, and there another caught his cry; it passed on, on, fading away eastward, traveling125like an alarm, like a spreading wave, until it spent itself against the margin of breaking day.

Isom Chase was dead, with an armful of gold upon his breast.

Aye, Isom Chase was dead. Back there in the still house his limbs were stiffening upon his kitchen floor. Isom Chase was dead on the eve of the most bountiful harvest his lands had yielded him in all his toil-freighted years. Dead, with his fields around him; dead, with the maize dangling heavy ears in the white moonlight; dead, with the gold of pumpkin lurking like unminted treasure in the margin of his field. Dead, with fat cattle in his pastures, fat swine in his confines, sleek horses in his barn-stalls, fat cockerels on his perch; dead, with a young wife shrinking among the shadows above his cold forehead, her eyes unclouded by a tear, her panting breast undisturbed by a sigh of pity or of pain.

126CHAPTER VIIIWILL HE TELL?

Constable Bill Frost was not a man of such acute suspicion as Sol Greening. He was a thin, slow man with a high, sharp nose and a sprangling, yellow mustache which extended broadly, like the horns of a steer. It did not enter his mind to connect Joe with the tragedy in a criminal way as they rode together back to the farm.When they arrived, they found Sol Greening and his married son Dan sitting on the front steps. Mrs. Greening was upstairs, comforting the young widow, who was “racked like a fiddle,” according to Sol.Sol took the constable around to the window and pointed out the body of Isom stretched beside the table.“You’re a officer of the law,” said Sol, “and these here primisis is now in your hands and charge, but I don’t think you orto go in that room. I think you orto leave him lay, just the way he dropped, for the coroner. That’s the law.”Frost was of the same opinion. He had no stomach for prying around dead men, anyhow.“We’ll leave him lay, Sol,” said he.“And it’s my opinion that you orto put handcuffs on that feller,” said Sol.“Which feller?” asked Bill.“That boy Joe,” said Sol.“Well, I ain’t got any, and I wouldn’t put ’em on him if I had,” said Bill. “He told me all about how it happened when we was comin’ over. Why, you don’t suspiciont he done it, do you, Sol?”“Circumstantial evidence,” said Sol, fresh from jury service127and full of the law, “is dead ag’in’ him, Bill. If I was you I’d slap him under arrest. They had words, you know.”“Yes; he told me they did,” said Bill.“But he didn’t tell you what them words was about,” said Sol deeply.The constable turned to Sol, the shaft of suspicion working its way through the small door of his mind.“By ganny!” said he.“I’d take him up and hand him over to the sheriff in the morning,” advised Sol.“I reckon I better do it,” Frost agreed, almost knocked breathless by the importance of the thing he had overlooked.So they laid their heads together to come to a proper method of procedure, and presently they marched around the corner of the house, shoulder to shoulder, as if prepared to intercept and overwhelm Joe if he tried to make a dash for liberty.They had left Joe sitting on the steps with Dan, and now they hurried around as if they expected to find his place empty and Dan stretched out, mangled and bleeding. But Joe was still there, in friendly conversation with Dan, showing no intention of running away. Frost advanced and laid his hand on Joe’s shoulder.“Joe Newbolt,” said he, “I put you under arrest on the suspiciont of shootin’ and murderin’ Isom Chase in cold blood.”It was a formula contrived between the constable and Sol. Sol had insisted on the “cold blood.” That was important and necessary, he declared. Omit that in making the arrest, and you had no case. It would fall through.Joe stood up, placing himself at the immediate disposal of the constable, which was rather embarrassing to Bill.“Well, Bill, if you think it’s necessary, all right,” said he.“Form of law demands it,” said Sol.128“But you might wait and see what the coroner thinks about it,” suggested Joe.“Perliminaries,” said Greening in his deep way.Then the question of what to do with the prisoner until morning arose. Joe pointed out that they could make no disposition of him, except to hold him in custody, until the coroner had held an inquest into the case and a conclusion had been reached by the jury. He suggested that they allow him to go to bed and get some needed sleep.That seemed to be a very sensible suggestion, according to Bill’s view of it. But Sol didn’t know whether it would be a regular proceeding and in strict accord with the forms of law. Indeed, he was of the opinion, after deliberating a while, that it would weaken the case materially. He was strongly in favor of handcuffs, or, in the absence of regulation manacles, a half-inch rope.After a great deal of discussion, during which Frost kept his hand officiously on Joe’s shoulder, it was agreed that the prisoner should be allowed to go to bed. He was to be lodged in the spare room upstairs, the one lately occupied by Morgan. Frost escorted him to it, and locked the door.“Is they erry winder in that room?” asked Sol, when Bill came back.“Reckon so,” said Frost, starting nervously. “I didn’t look.”“Better see,” said Sol, getting up to investigate.They went round to the side of the house. Yes, there was a window, and it was wide open.But any doubt that the prisoner might have escaped through it was soon quieted by the sound of his snore. Joe had thrown himself across the bed, boots and all, and was already shoulder-deep in sleep. They decided that, at daylight, Sol’s son should ride to the county-seat, seven miles distant, and notify the coroner.129During the time they spent between Joe’s retirement and daybreak, Sol improved the minutes by arraigning, convicting, and condemning Joe for the murder of old Isom. He did it so impressively that he had Constable Frost on edge over the tremendous responsibility that rested on his back. Bill was in a sweat, although the night was cool. He tiptoed around, listening, spying, prying; he stood looking up at Joe’s window until his neck ached; he explored the yard for hidden weapons and treasure, and he peered and poked with a rake-handle into shrubbery and vines.They could hear the women upstairs talking once in a while, and now and again they caught the sound of a piteous moan.“She ain’t seen him,” said Sol; “I wouldn’t let her come down. She may not be in no condition to look on a muss like that, her a young woman and only married a little while.”Bill agreed on that, as he agreed on every hypothesis which Sol propounded out of his wisdom, now that his official heat had been raised.“If I hadn’t got here when I did he’d ’a’ skinned out with all of that money,” said Sol. “He was standin’ there with his hat in his hand, all ready to scoop it up.”“How’d he come to go after me?” asked Bill.“Well, folks don’t always do things on their own accord,” said Sol, giving Bill an unmistakable look.“Oh, that was the way of it,” nodded Bill. “I thought it was funny if he––”“He knowed he didn’t have a ghost of a chance to git away between me and you,” said Sol.Morning came, and with it rode Sol’s son to fetch the coroner.Sol had established himself in the case so that he would lose very little glory in the day’s revelations, and there remained one pleasant duty yet which he proposed to take upon himself. That was nothing less than carrying the news130of the tragedy and Joe’s arrest to Mrs. Newbolt in her lonely home at the foot of the hill.Sol’s son spread the news as he rode through the thin morning to the county-seat, drawing up at barn-yard gates, hailing the neighbors on the way to their fields, pouring the amazing story into the avid ears of all who met him. Sol carried the story in the opposite direction, trotting his horse along full of leisurely importance and the enjoyment of the distinction which had fallen on him through his early connection with the strange event. When they heard it, men turned back from their fields and hastened to the Chase farm, to peer through the kitchen window and shock their toil-blunted senses in the horror of the scene.Curiosity is stronger than thrift in most men, and those of that community were no better fortified against it than others of their kind. Long before Sol Greening’s great lubberly son reached the county-seat, a crowd had gathered at the farmstead of Isom Chase. Bill Frost, now bristling with the dignity of his official power, moved among them soberly, the object of great respect as the living, moving embodiment of the law.Yesterday he was only Bill Frost, a tenant of rented land, filling an office that was only a name; this morning he was Constable Bill Frost, with the power and dignity of the State of Missouri behind him, guarding a house of mystery and death. Law and authority had transformed him overnight, settling upon him as the spirit used to come upon the prophets in the good old days.Bill had only to stretch out his arm, and strong men would fall back, pale and awed, away from the wall of the house; he had but to caution them in a low word to keep hands off everything, to be instantly obeyed. They drew away into the yard and stood in low-voiced groups, the process of thought momentarily stunned by this terrible thing.131“Ain’t it awful?” a graybeard would whisper to a stripling youth.“Ain’t it terrible?” would come the reply.“Well, well, well! Old Isom!”That was as far as any of them could go. Then they would walk softly, scarcely breathing, to the window and peep in again.Joe, unhailed and undisturbed, was spinning out his sleep. Mrs. Greening brought coffee and refreshments for the young widow from her own kitchen across the road, and the sun rose and drove the mists out of the hollows, as a shepherd drives his flocks out to graze upon the hill.As Sol Greening hitched his horse to the Widow Newbolt’s fence, he heard her singing with long-drawn quavers and lingering semibreves:There is a fountain filled with blood,Drawn from Immanuel’s veins....She appeared at the kitchen door, a pan in her hand, a flock of expectant chickens craning their necks to see what she had to offer, at the instant that Sol came around the corner of the house. She all but let the pan fall in her amazement, and the song was cut off between her lips in the middle of a word, for it was not more than six o’clock, uncommonly early for visitors.“Mercy me, Sol Greening, you give me an awful jump!” said she.“Well, I didn’t aim to,” said Sol, turning over in his mind the speech that he had drawn up in the last uninterrupted stage of his journey over.Mrs. Newbolt looked at him sharply, turning her head a little with a quick, pert movement, not unlike one of her hens.“Is anybody sick over your way?” she asked.She could not account for the early visit in any other132manner. People commonly came for her at all hours of the day and night when there was somebody sick and in need of a herb-wise nurse. She had helped a great many of the young ones of that community into the world, and she had eased the pains of many old ones who were quitting it. So she thought that Greening’s visit must have something to do with either life or death.“No, nobody just azackly sick,” dodged Greening.“Well, laws my soul, you make a mighty mystery over it! What’s the matter–can’t you talk?”“But I can’t say, Missis Newbolt, that everybody’s just azackly well,” said he.“Some of your folks?”“No, not none of mine,” said Sol.“Then whose?” she inquired impatiently.“Isom’s,” said he.“You don’t mean my Joe?” she asked slowly, a shadow of pain drawing her face.“I mean Isom,” said Sol.“Isom?” said she, relieved. “Why didn’t Joe come after me?” Before Sol could adjust his program to meet this unexpected exigency, she demanded: “Well, what’s the matter with Isom?”“Dead,” said Sol, dropping his voice impressively.“You don’t mean–well, shades of mercy, Isom dead! What was it–cholera-morbus?”“Killed,” said Sol; “shot down with his own gun and killed as dead as a dornix.”“His own gun! Well, sakes–who done it?”“Only one man knows,” said Sol, shaking his head solemnly. “I’ll tell you how it was.”Sol started away back at the summons to jury service, worked up to the case in which he and Isom had sat together, followed Isom then along the road home, and galloped to133overtake him. He arrived at his gate–all in his long and complete narrative–again, as he had done in reality the night past; he heard the shot in Isom’s house; he leaped to the ground; he ran. He saw a light in the kitchen of Isom’s house, but the door was closed; he knocked, and somebody called to him to enter. He opened the door and saw Isom lying there, still and bloody, money–gold money–all over him, and a man standing there beside him. There was nobody else in the room.“Shades of mercy!” she gasped. “Who was that man?”Sol looked at her pityingly. He put his hand to his forehead as if it gave him pain to speak.“It was your Joe,” said he.She sighed, greatly lightened and relieved.“Oh, then Joe he told you how it happened?” said she.“Ma’am,” said Sol impressively, “he said they was alone in the kitchen when it happened; he said him and Isom had some words, and Isom he reached up to pull down the gun, and the hammer caught, and it went off and shot him. That’s what Joe told me, ma’am.”“Well, Sol Greening, you talk like you didn’t believe him!” she scorned. “If Joe said that, it’s so.”“I hope to God it is!” said Sol, drawing a great breath.If Sol had looked for tears, his eyes were cheated; if he had listened for screams, wailings, and moanings, his ears were disappointed. Sarah Newbolt stood straight and haughtily scornful in her kitchen door, her dark eyes bright between their snapping lids.“Where’s Joe?” she asked sternly.“He’s over there,” said Sol, feeling that he had made a noise like a peanut-bag which one inflates and smashes in the palm in the expectation of startling the world.“Have they took him up?”134“Well, you see, Bill Frost’s kind of keepin’ his eye on him till the inquest,” explained Sol.“Yes, and I could name the man that put him up to it,” said she.“Well, circumstantial evidence–” began Sol.“Oh, circumstance your granny!” she stopped him pettishly.Mrs. Newbolt emptied her pan among the scrambling fowls by turning it suddenly upside down. That done, she reached behind her and put it on the table. Her face had grown hard and severe, and her eyes were fierce.“Wouldn’t believe my boy!” said she bitterly. “Are you going over that way now?”“Guess I’ll be ridin’ along over.”“Well, you tell Joe that I’ll be there as quick as shank’s horses can carry me,” she said, turning away from the door, leaving Sol to gather what pleasure he was able out of the situation.She lost no time in primping and preparing, but was on the road before Sol had gone a quarter of a mile.Mrs. Newbolt cut across fields, arriving at the Chase farm almost as soon as Sol Greening did on his strawberry roan. The coroner had not come when she got there; Bill Frost allowed Joe to come down to the unused parlor of old Isom’s house to talk with her. Frost showed a disposition to linger within the room and hear what was said, but she pushed him out.“I’ll not let him run off, Bill Frost,” said she. “If he’d wanted to run, if he’d had anything to run from, he could ’a’ gone last night, couldn’t he, you dunce?”She closed the door, and no word of what passed between mother and son reached the outside of it, although Bill Frost strained his ear against it, listening.When the coroner arrived in the middle of the forenoon he135found no difficulty in obtaining a jury to inquire into Isom’s death. The major and minor male inhabitants of the entire neighborhood were assembled there, every qualified man of them itching to sit on the jury. As the coroner had need of but six, and these being soon chosen, the others had no further pleasure to look forward to save the inquiry into the tragedy.After examining the wound which caused Isom’s death, the coroner had ordered the body removed from the kitchen floor. The lamp was still burning on the table, and the coroner blew it out; the gold lay scattered on the floor where it had fallen, and he gathered it up and put it in the little sack.When the coroner went to the parlor to convene the inquest, the crowd packed after him. Those who were not able to get into the room clustered in a bunch at the door, and protruded themselves in at the windows, silent and expectant.Joe sat with his mother on one hand, Constable Frost on the other, and across the room was Ollie, wedged between fat Mrs. Sol Greening and her bony daughter-in-law, who claimed the office of ministrants on the ground of priority above all the gasping, sympathetic, and exclaiming females who had arrived after them.Ollie was pale and exhausted in appearance, her face drawn and bloodless, like that of one who wakes out of an anesthetic after a surgical operation upon some vital part. Her eyes were hollowed, her nostrils pinched, but there was no trace of tears upon her cheeks. The neighbors said it was dry grief, the deepest and most lasting that racks the human heart. They pitied her, so young and fair, so crushed and bowed under that sudden, dark sorrow.Mrs. Greening had thrown something black over the young widow’s shoulders, of which she seemed unaware. It kept slipping and falling down, revealing her white dress, and Mrs. Greening kept adjusting it with motherly hand. Sitting136bent, like an old woman, Ollie twisted and wound her nervous hot fingers in her lap. Now and then she lifted her eyes to Joe’s, as if struggling to read what intention lay behind the pale calm of his face.No wonder she looked at him wild and fearful, people said. It was more than anybody could understand, that sudden development of fierce passion and treachery in a boy who always had been so shy and steady. No wonder she gazed at him that way, poor thing!Of course they did not dream how far they were from interpreting that look in the young widow’s eyes. There was one question in her life that morning, and one only, it seemed. It stood in front of the future and blocked all thought of it like a heavy door. Over and over it revolved in her mind. It was written in fire in her aching brain.When they put Joe Newbolt on the witness-stand and asked him how it happened, would he stand true to his first intention and protect her, or would he betray it all?That was what troubled Ollie. She did not know, and in his face there was no answer.Sol Greening was the first witness. He told again to the jury of his neighbors the story which he had gone over a score of times that morning. Mrs. Newbolt nodded when he related what Joe had told him, as if to say there was no doubt about that; Joe had told her the same thing. It was true.The coroner, a quick, sharp little man with a beard of unnatural blackness, thick eyebrows and sleek hair, helped him along with a question now and then.“There was nobody in the room but Joe Newbolt when you arrived?”“Nobody else–no livin’ body,” replied Sol.“No other living body. And Joe Newbolt was standing beside the body of Isom Chase, near the head, you say?”137“Yes, near Isom’s head.”“With his hat in his hand, as if he had just entered the room, or was about to leave it?”Sol nodded.“Do you know anything about a man who had been boarding here the past week or two?”The coroner seemed to ask this as an afterthought.“Morgan,” said Sol, crossing his legs the other way for relief. “Yes, I knowed him.”“Did you see him here last night?”“No, he wasn’t here. The old lady said he stopped in at our house yesterday morning to sell me a ready-reckoner.”Sol chuckled, perhaps over what he considered a narrow escape.“I was over at Shelbyville, on the jury, and I wasn’t there, so he didn’t sell it. Been tryin’ to for a week. He told the old lady that was his last day here, and he was leavin’ then.”“And about what time of night was it when you heard the shot in Isom Chase’s house, and ran over?”“Along about first rooster-crow,” said Sol.“And that might be about what hour?”“Well, I’ve knowed ’em to crow at ’leven this time o’ year, and ag’in I’ve knowed ’em to put it off as late as two. But I should judge that it was about twelve when I come over here the first time last night.”Sol was excused with that. He left the witness-chair with ponderous solemnity. The coroner’s stenographer had taken down his testimony, and was now leaning back in his chair as serenely as if unconscious of his own marvelous accomplishment of being able to write down a man’s words as fast as he could talk.Not so to those who beheld the feat for the first time. They watched the young man, who was a ripe-cheeked chap with138pale hair, as if they expected to catch him in the fraud and pretense of it in the end, and lay bare the deceit which he practised upon the world.The coroner was making notes of his own, stroking his black beard thoughtfully, and in the pause between witnesses the assembled neighbors had the pleasure of inspecting the parlor of dead Isom Chase which they had invaded, into which, living, he never had invited them.Isom’s first wife had arranged that room, in the hope of her young heart, years and years ago. Its walls were papered in bridal gaiety, its colors still bright, for the full light of day seldom fell into it as now. There hung a picture of that bride’s father, a man with shaved lip and a forest of beard from ears to Adam’s apple, in a little oval frame; and there, across the room, was another, of her mother, Quakerish in look, with smooth hair and a white something on her neck and bosom, held at her throat by a portrait brooch. On the table, just under that fast-writing young man’s eyes, was a glass thing shaped like a cake cover, protecting some flowers made of human hair, and sprigs of bachelor’s button, faded now, and losing their petals.There hung the marriage certificate of Isom and his first wife, framed in tarnished gilt which was flaking from the wood, a blue ribbon through a slit in one corner of the document, like the pendant of a seal, and there stood the horsehair-upholstered chairs, so spare of back and thin of shank that the rustics would stand rather than trust their corn-fed weight upon them. Underfoot was a store-bought carpet, as full of roses as the Elysian Fields, and over by the door lay a round, braided rag mat, into which Isom’s old wife had stitched the hunger of her heart and the brine of her lonely tears.The coroner looked up from his little red-leather note-book.“Joe Newbolt, step over here and be sworn,” said he.139Joe crossed over to the witness-chair, picking his way through feet and legs. As he turned, facing the coroner, his hand upraised, Ollie looked at him steadily, her fingers fluttering and twining.Twelve hours had made a woeful change in her. She was as gaunt as a suckling she-hound, an old terror lay lurking in her young eyes. For one hour of dread is worse than a year of weeping. One may grieve, honestly and deeply, without wearing away the cheeks or burning out the heart, for there is a soft sorrow which lies upon the soul like a deadening mist upon the autumn fields. But there is no worry without waste. One day of it will burn more of the fuel of human life than a decade of placid sorrow.How much would he tell? Would it be all–the story of the caress in the kitchen door, the orchard’s secret, the attempt to run away from Isom–or would he shield her in some manner? If he should tell all, there sat an audience ready to snatch the tale and carry it away, and spread it abroad. Then disgrace would follow, pitiless and driving, and Morgan was not there to bear her away from it, or to mitigate its sting.Bill Frost edged over and stood behind the witness chair. His act gave the audience a thrill. “He’s under arrest!” they whispered, sending it from ear to ear. Most of them had known it before, but there was something so full and satisfying in the words. Not once before in years had there been occasion to use them; it might be years again before another opportunity presented. They had an official sound, a sound of adventure and desperation. And so they whispered them, neighbor nodding to neighbor in deep understanding as it went round the room, like a pass-word in secret conclave: “He’s under arrest!”There was nobody present to advise Joe of his rights. He had been accused of the crime and taken into custody, yet140they were calling on him now to give evidence which might be used against him. If he had any doubt about the legality of the proceeding, he was too certain of the outcome of the inquiry to hesitate or demur. There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind that his neighbors, men who had known him all his life, and his father before him, would acquit him of all blame in the matter and set him free. They would believe him, assuredly. Therefore, he answered cheerfully when the coroner put the usual questions concerning age and nativity. Then the coroner leaned back in his chair.“Now, Joe, tell the jury just how it happened,” said he.The jury looked up with a little start of guilt at the coroner’s reference to itself, presenting a great deal of whiskers and shocks of untrimmed hair, together with some reddening of the face. For the jury had been following the movements of the coroner’s stenographer, as if it, also, expected to catch him in the trick of it that would incriminate him and send him to the penitentiary for life.“I’d been down to the barn and out by the gate, looking around,” said Joe. There he paused.“Yes; looking around,” encouraged the coroner, believing from the lad’s appearance and slow manner that he had a dull fellow in hand. “Now, what were you looking around for, Joe?”“I had a kind of uneasy feeling, and I wanted to see if everything was safe,” said Joe.“Afraid of horse-thieves, or something like that?”“Something like that,” nodded Joe.Mrs. Newbolt, sitting very straight-backed, held her lips tight, for she was impressed with the seriousness of the occasion. Now and then she nodded, as if confirming to herself some foregone conclusion.“Isom had left me in charge of the place, and I didn’t141want him to come back and find anything gone,” Joe explained.“I see,” said the coroner in a friendly way. “Then what did you do?”“I went back to the house and lit the lamp in the kitchen,” said Joe.“How long was that before Isom came in?”“Only a little while; ten or fifteen minutes, or maybe less.”“And what did Isom say when he came in, Joe?”“He said he’d kill me, he was in a temper,” Joe replied.“You had no quarrel before he said that, Isom just burst right into the room and threatened to kill you, did he, Joe? Now, you’re sure about that?”“Yes, I’m perfectly sure.”“What had you done to send Isom off into a temper that way?”“I hadn’t done a thing,” said Joe, meeting the coroner’s gaze honestly.The coroner asked him concerning his position in the room, what he was doing, and whether he had anything in his hands that excited Isom when he saw it.“My hands were as empty as they are this minute,” said Joe, but not without a little color in his cheeks when he remembered how hot and small Ollie’s hand had felt within his own.“When did you first see this?” asked the coroner, holding up the sack with the burst corner which had lain on Isom’s breast.The ruptured corner had been tied with a string, and the sack bulged heavily in the coroner’s hand.“When Isom was lying on the floor after he was shot,” said Joe.A movement of feet was audible through the room. People looked at each other, incredulity in their eyes. The coroner142returned to the incidents which led up to the shooting snapping back to that phase of the inquiry suddenly, as if in the expectation of catching Joe off his guard.“What did he threaten to kill you for?” he asked sharply.“Well, Isom was an unreasonable and quick-tempered man,” Joe replied.The coroner rose to his feet in a quick start, as if he intended to leap over the table. He pointed his finger at Joe, shaking his somber beard.“What did Isom Chase catch you at when he came into that kitchen?” he asked accusingly.“He saw me standing there, just about to blow out the light and go to bed,” said Joe.“What did you and Isom quarrel about last night?”Joe did not reply at once. He seemed debating with himself over the advisability of answering at all. Then he raised his slow eyes to the coroner’s face.“That was between him and me,” said he.“Very well,” said the coroner shortly, resuming his seat. “You may tell the jury how Isom Chase was shot.”Joe described Isom’s leap for the gun, the struggle he had with him to restrain him, the catching of the lock in the fork as Isom tugged at the barrel, the shot, and Isom’s death.When he finished, the coroner bent over his note-book again, as if little interested and less impressed. Silence fell over the room. Then the coroner spoke, his head still bent over the book, not even turning his face toward the witness, his voice soft and low.“You were alone with Isom in the kitchen when this happened?”A flash of heat ran over Ollie’s body. After it came a sweeping wave of cold. The room whirled; the world stood on edge. Her hour had struck; the last moment of her143troubled security was speeding away. What would Joe answer to that?“Yes,” said Joe calmly, “we were alone.”Ollie breathed again; her heart’s constriction relaxed.The coroner wheeled on Joe.“Where was Mrs. Chase?” he asked.A little murmur, as of people drawing together with whispers; a little soft scuffing of cautiously shifted feet on the carpet, followed the question. Ollie shrank back, as if wincing from pain.“Mrs. Chase was upstairs in her room,” answered Joe.The weight of a thousand centuries lifted from Ollie’s body. Her vision cleared. Her breath came back in measured flow to her lips, moist and refreshing.He had not told. He was standing between her and the sharp tongues of those waiting people, already licking hungrily in their awakened suspicion, ready to sear her fair name like flames. But there was no gratitude in her heart that moment, no quick lifting of thankfulness nor understanding of the great peril which Joe had assumed for her. There was only relief, blessed, easing, cool relief. He had not told.But the coroner was a persistent man. He was making more than an investigation out of it; he was fairly turning it into a trial, with Joe as the defendant. The people were ready to see that, and appreciate his attempts to uncover the dark motive that lay behind this deed, of which they were convinced, almost to a man, that Joe was guilty.“Was Isom jealous of you?” asked the coroner, beginning the assault on Joe’s reserve suddenly again when it seemed that he was through. For the first time during the inquiry Joe’s voice was unsteady when he replied.“He had no cause to be, and you’ve got no right to ask me that, either, sir!” he said.144“Shame on you, shame on you!” said Mrs. Newbolt, leaning toward the coroner, shaking her head reprovingly.“I’ve got the right to ask you anything that I see fit and proper, young man,” the coroner rebuked him sternly.“Well, maybe you have,” granted Joe, drawing himself straight in the chair.“Did Isom Chase ever find you alone with his wife?” the coroner asked.“Now you look here, sir, if you’ll ask me questions that a gentleman ought to ask, I’ll answer you like a gentleman, but I’ll never answer such questions as that!”There was a certain polite deference in Joe’s voice, which he felt that he owed, perhaps, to the office that the man represented, but there was a firmness above it all that was unmistakable.“You refuse to answer any more questions, then?” said the coroner slowly, and with a significance that was almost sinister.“I’ll answer any proper questions you care to ask me,” answered Joe.“Very well, then. You say that you and Isom quarreled last night?”“Yes, sir; we had a little spat.”“A little spat,” repeated the coroner, looking around the room as if to ask the people on whose votes he depended for reelection whattheythought of a “little spat” which ended in a man’s death. There was a sort of broad humor about it which appealed to the blunt rural sense. A grin ran over their faces like a spreading wavelet on a pool. “Well now, what was the beginning of that ‘little spat’?”“Oh, what’s that got to do with it?” asked Joe impatiently. “You asked me that before.”“And I’m asking you again. What was that quarrel over?”145“None of your business!” said Joe hotly, caring nothing for consequences.“Then you refuse to answer, and persist in your refusal?”“Well, we don’t seem to get on very well,” said Joe.“No, we don’t,” the coroner agreed snappishly. “Stand down; that will be all.”The listening people shifted and relaxed, leaned and whispered, turning quick eyes upon Joe, studying him with furtive wonder, as if they had discovered in him some fearful and hideous thing, which he, moving among them all his life, had kept concealed until that day.Ollie followed him in the witness-chair. She related her story, framed on the cue that she had taken from Greening’s testimony and Joe’s substantiation of it, in low, trembling voice, and with eyes downcast. She knew nothing about the tragedy until Sol called up to her, she said, and then she was in ignorance of what had happened. Mrs. Greening had told her when she came that Isom was killed.Ollie was asked about the book-agent boarder, as Greening had been asked. Morgan had left on the morning of the fateful day, she said, having finished his work in that part of the country. She and Joe were alone in the house that night.The coroner spared her, no matter how far his sharp suspicions flashed into the obscurity of the relations between herself and the young bondman. The people, especially the women, approved his leniency with nods. Her testimony concluded the inquiry, and the coroner addressed the jury.“Gentlemen,” he said, “you will take into consideration the evidence you have heard, and determine, if possible, the manner in which Isom Chase came to his death, and fix the responsibility for the same. It is within your power to recommend that any person believed by you to be directly or indirectly responsible for his death, be held to the grand146jury for further investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body.”Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life. Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and with fear.Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet. The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other’s shoulders and then backed away.For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day. The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and there was no doubt that it was his own.That also was the opinion of the coroner’s jury, which walked out from its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound, inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal.147Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic breasts. She stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression around the room.“Joe didn’t do it, if that’s what you mean,” said she.“Madam–” began the coroner severely.“Yes, you little whiffet,” she burst out sharply, “you’re the one that put ’em up to do it! Joe didn’t do it, I tell you, and you men know that as well as I do. Every one of you has knowed him all his life!”“Madam, I must ask you not to interrupt the proceedings,” said the coroner.“Order in the court!” commanded the constable in his deepest official voice.“Oh, shut your fool mouth, Bill Frost!” said Mrs. Newbolt scornfully.“Never mind, Mother,” counseled Joe. “I’ll be all right. They have to do what they’re doing, I suppose.”“Yes, they’re doin’ what that little snip-snapper with them colored whiskers tells ’em to do!” said she.Solemn as the occasion was, a grin went round at the bald reference to a plainer fact. Even the dullest there had seen the grayish-red at the roots of the coroner’s beard. The coroner grew very red of face, and gave some orders to his stenographer, who wrote them down. He thanked the jurors and dismissed them. Bill Frost began to prepare for the journey to Shelbyville to turn Joe over to the sheriff.The first, and most important, thing in the list of preliminaries for the journey, was the proper adjustment of Bill’s mustache. Bill roached it up with a turn of the forefinger,148using the back of it, which was rough, like a corn-cob. When he had got the ends elevated at a valiant angle, his hat firmly settled upon his head, and his suspenders tightened two inches, he touched Joe’s shoulder.“Come on!” he ordered as gruffly and formally as he could draw his edged voice.Joe stood, and Bill put his hand on his arm to pilot him, in all officiousness, out of the room. Mrs. Newbolt stepped in front of them as they approached.“Joe!” she cried appealingly.“That’s all right, Mother,” he comforted her, “everything will be cleared up and settled in a day or two. You go on home now, Mother, and look after things till I come.”“Step out of the way, step out of the way!” said Bill with spreading impatience.Mrs. Newbolt looked at the blustering official pityingly.“Bill Frost, you ain’t got as much sense as you was born with!” said she. She patted Joe’s shoulder, which was as near an approach to tenderness as he ever remembered her to make.Constable Frost fell into consultation with his adjutant, Sol Greening, as soon as he cleared the room with the prisoner. They discussed gravely in the prisoner’s hearing, for Bill kept his hand on Joe’s arm all the time, the advisability of tying him securely with a rope before starting on the journey to jail.Joe grew indignant over this base proposal. He declared that if Bill was afraid of him he would go alone to the county-seat and give himself up to the sheriff if they would set him free. Bill was a little assured by his prisoner’s evident sincerity.Another consultation brought them to the agreement that the best they could do, in the absence of handcuffs, was to hitch up to Isom’s buggy and make the prisoner drive. With149hands employed on the lines, he could be watched narrowly by Bill who was to take Sol’s old navy six along in his mighty hand.Mrs. Newbolt viewed the officious constable’s preparations for the journey with many expressions of anger and disdain.“Just look at that old fool, Bill Frost, with that revolver!” said she, turning to the neighbors, who stood silently watching. “Just as if Joe would hurt anybody, or try to run away!”Sympathy seemed to be lacking in the crowd. Everybody was against Joe, that was attested by the glum faces and silence which met her on every hand. She was amazed at their stupidity. There they stood, people who had seen Joe grow up, people who knew that a Newbolt would give his last cent and go hungry to meet an obligation; that he would wear rags to pay his debts, as Peter had done, as Joe was doing after him; that he would work and strive night and day to keep fair his honorable name, and to preserve the honest record of the family clear and clean.They all knew that, and they knew that a Newbolt never lied, but they hunched their backs and turned away their heads as if they thought a body was going to hit them when she spoke. It disgusted her; she felt like she could turn loose on some of them with their own records, which she had from a generation back.She approached the buggy as Joe took up the lines and prepared to drive out of the gate.“I don’t see why they think you done it, son, it’s so unreasonable and unneighborly of them,” said she.“Neighborly!” said Joe, with sudden bitterness in his young voice. “What am I to them but ‘the pore folks’ boy’? They didn’t believe me, Mother, but when I get a chance to stand up before Judge Maxwell over at Shelbyville, I’ll be talking to a gentleman. A gentleman will understand.”150That sounded like his father, she thought. It moved her with a feeling of the pride which she had reflected feebly for so many years.“I hope so, son,” said she. “If you’re not back in a day or two, I’ll be over to Shelbyville.”“Drive on, drive on!” ordered Bill, the old black revolver in his hand.The crowd was impressed by that weapon, knowing its history, as everybody did. Greening’s more or less honorable father had carried it with him when he rode in the train of Quantrell, the infamous bushwhacker. It was the old man’s boast to his dying day that he had exterminated a family of father and five sons in the raid upon Lawrence with that old weapon, without recharging it.Joe drove through the open gate without a look behind him. His face was pale, his heart was sick with the humiliation of that day. But he felt that it was only a temporary cloud into which he had stepped, and that clearing would come again in a little while. It was inconceivable to him how anybody could be so foolish as to believe, or even suspect, that he had murdered Isom Chase.The assembled people having heard all there was to hear, and seen all there was to see at the gate, began to straggle back to the farmhouse to gossip, to gape, and exclaim. To Greening and his family had fallen the office of comforting the widow and arranging for the burial, and now Sol had many offers to sit up with the corpse that night.Mrs. Newbolt stood at the roadside, looking after the conveyance which was taking her son away to jail, until a bend behind a tall hedge hid it from her eyes. She made no further attempt to find sympathy or support among her neighbors, who looked at her curiously as she stood there, and turned away selfishly when she faced them.Back over the road that she had hurried along that morning151she trudged, slowly and without spirit, her feet like stones. As she went, she tried to arrange the day’s happenings in her mind. All was confusion there. The one plain thing, the thing that persisted and obtruded, was that they had arrested Joe on a charge that was at once hideous and unjust.Evening was falling when she reached the turn of the road and looked ahead to her home. She had no heart for supper, no heart to lift the latch of the kitchen door and enter there. There was no desire in her heart but for her son, and no comfort in the prospect of her oncoming night.

Constable Bill Frost was not a man of such acute suspicion as Sol Greening. He was a thin, slow man with a high, sharp nose and a sprangling, yellow mustache which extended broadly, like the horns of a steer. It did not enter his mind to connect Joe with the tragedy in a criminal way as they rode together back to the farm.

When they arrived, they found Sol Greening and his married son Dan sitting on the front steps. Mrs. Greening was upstairs, comforting the young widow, who was “racked like a fiddle,” according to Sol.

Sol took the constable around to the window and pointed out the body of Isom stretched beside the table.

“You’re a officer of the law,” said Sol, “and these here primisis is now in your hands and charge, but I don’t think you orto go in that room. I think you orto leave him lay, just the way he dropped, for the coroner. That’s the law.”

Frost was of the same opinion. He had no stomach for prying around dead men, anyhow.

“We’ll leave him lay, Sol,” said he.

“And it’s my opinion that you orto put handcuffs on that feller,” said Sol.

“Which feller?” asked Bill.

“That boy Joe,” said Sol.

“Well, I ain’t got any, and I wouldn’t put ’em on him if I had,” said Bill. “He told me all about how it happened when we was comin’ over. Why, you don’t suspiciont he done it, do you, Sol?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” said Sol, fresh from jury service127and full of the law, “is dead ag’in’ him, Bill. If I was you I’d slap him under arrest. They had words, you know.”

“Yes; he told me they did,” said Bill.

“But he didn’t tell you what them words was about,” said Sol deeply.

The constable turned to Sol, the shaft of suspicion working its way through the small door of his mind.

“By ganny!” said he.

“I’d take him up and hand him over to the sheriff in the morning,” advised Sol.

“I reckon I better do it,” Frost agreed, almost knocked breathless by the importance of the thing he had overlooked.

So they laid their heads together to come to a proper method of procedure, and presently they marched around the corner of the house, shoulder to shoulder, as if prepared to intercept and overwhelm Joe if he tried to make a dash for liberty.

They had left Joe sitting on the steps with Dan, and now they hurried around as if they expected to find his place empty and Dan stretched out, mangled and bleeding. But Joe was still there, in friendly conversation with Dan, showing no intention of running away. Frost advanced and laid his hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“Joe Newbolt,” said he, “I put you under arrest on the suspiciont of shootin’ and murderin’ Isom Chase in cold blood.”

It was a formula contrived between the constable and Sol. Sol had insisted on the “cold blood.” That was important and necessary, he declared. Omit that in making the arrest, and you had no case. It would fall through.

Joe stood up, placing himself at the immediate disposal of the constable, which was rather embarrassing to Bill.

“Well, Bill, if you think it’s necessary, all right,” said he.

“Form of law demands it,” said Sol.128

“But you might wait and see what the coroner thinks about it,” suggested Joe.

“Perliminaries,” said Greening in his deep way.

Then the question of what to do with the prisoner until morning arose. Joe pointed out that they could make no disposition of him, except to hold him in custody, until the coroner had held an inquest into the case and a conclusion had been reached by the jury. He suggested that they allow him to go to bed and get some needed sleep.

That seemed to be a very sensible suggestion, according to Bill’s view of it. But Sol didn’t know whether it would be a regular proceeding and in strict accord with the forms of law. Indeed, he was of the opinion, after deliberating a while, that it would weaken the case materially. He was strongly in favor of handcuffs, or, in the absence of regulation manacles, a half-inch rope.

After a great deal of discussion, during which Frost kept his hand officiously on Joe’s shoulder, it was agreed that the prisoner should be allowed to go to bed. He was to be lodged in the spare room upstairs, the one lately occupied by Morgan. Frost escorted him to it, and locked the door.

“Is they erry winder in that room?” asked Sol, when Bill came back.

“Reckon so,” said Frost, starting nervously. “I didn’t look.”

“Better see,” said Sol, getting up to investigate.

They went round to the side of the house. Yes, there was a window, and it was wide open.

But any doubt that the prisoner might have escaped through it was soon quieted by the sound of his snore. Joe had thrown himself across the bed, boots and all, and was already shoulder-deep in sleep. They decided that, at daylight, Sol’s son should ride to the county-seat, seven miles distant, and notify the coroner.129

During the time they spent between Joe’s retirement and daybreak, Sol improved the minutes by arraigning, convicting, and condemning Joe for the murder of old Isom. He did it so impressively that he had Constable Frost on edge over the tremendous responsibility that rested on his back. Bill was in a sweat, although the night was cool. He tiptoed around, listening, spying, prying; he stood looking up at Joe’s window until his neck ached; he explored the yard for hidden weapons and treasure, and he peered and poked with a rake-handle into shrubbery and vines.

They could hear the women upstairs talking once in a while, and now and again they caught the sound of a piteous moan.

“She ain’t seen him,” said Sol; “I wouldn’t let her come down. She may not be in no condition to look on a muss like that, her a young woman and only married a little while.”

Bill agreed on that, as he agreed on every hypothesis which Sol propounded out of his wisdom, now that his official heat had been raised.

“If I hadn’t got here when I did he’d ’a’ skinned out with all of that money,” said Sol. “He was standin’ there with his hat in his hand, all ready to scoop it up.”

“How’d he come to go after me?” asked Bill.

“Well, folks don’t always do things on their own accord,” said Sol, giving Bill an unmistakable look.

“Oh, that was the way of it,” nodded Bill. “I thought it was funny if he––”

“He knowed he didn’t have a ghost of a chance to git away between me and you,” said Sol.

Morning came, and with it rode Sol’s son to fetch the coroner.

Sol had established himself in the case so that he would lose very little glory in the day’s revelations, and there remained one pleasant duty yet which he proposed to take upon himself. That was nothing less than carrying the news130of the tragedy and Joe’s arrest to Mrs. Newbolt in her lonely home at the foot of the hill.

Sol’s son spread the news as he rode through the thin morning to the county-seat, drawing up at barn-yard gates, hailing the neighbors on the way to their fields, pouring the amazing story into the avid ears of all who met him. Sol carried the story in the opposite direction, trotting his horse along full of leisurely importance and the enjoyment of the distinction which had fallen on him through his early connection with the strange event. When they heard it, men turned back from their fields and hastened to the Chase farm, to peer through the kitchen window and shock their toil-blunted senses in the horror of the scene.

Curiosity is stronger than thrift in most men, and those of that community were no better fortified against it than others of their kind. Long before Sol Greening’s great lubberly son reached the county-seat, a crowd had gathered at the farmstead of Isom Chase. Bill Frost, now bristling with the dignity of his official power, moved among them soberly, the object of great respect as the living, moving embodiment of the law.

Yesterday he was only Bill Frost, a tenant of rented land, filling an office that was only a name; this morning he was Constable Bill Frost, with the power and dignity of the State of Missouri behind him, guarding a house of mystery and death. Law and authority had transformed him overnight, settling upon him as the spirit used to come upon the prophets in the good old days.

Bill had only to stretch out his arm, and strong men would fall back, pale and awed, away from the wall of the house; he had but to caution them in a low word to keep hands off everything, to be instantly obeyed. They drew away into the yard and stood in low-voiced groups, the process of thought momentarily stunned by this terrible thing.131

“Ain’t it awful?” a graybeard would whisper to a stripling youth.

“Ain’t it terrible?” would come the reply.

“Well, well, well! Old Isom!”

That was as far as any of them could go. Then they would walk softly, scarcely breathing, to the window and peep in again.

Joe, unhailed and undisturbed, was spinning out his sleep. Mrs. Greening brought coffee and refreshments for the young widow from her own kitchen across the road, and the sun rose and drove the mists out of the hollows, as a shepherd drives his flocks out to graze upon the hill.

As Sol Greening hitched his horse to the Widow Newbolt’s fence, he heard her singing with long-drawn quavers and lingering semibreves:

There is a fountain filled with blood,Drawn from Immanuel’s veins....

She appeared at the kitchen door, a pan in her hand, a flock of expectant chickens craning their necks to see what she had to offer, at the instant that Sol came around the corner of the house. She all but let the pan fall in her amazement, and the song was cut off between her lips in the middle of a word, for it was not more than six o’clock, uncommonly early for visitors.

“Mercy me, Sol Greening, you give me an awful jump!” said she.

“Well, I didn’t aim to,” said Sol, turning over in his mind the speech that he had drawn up in the last uninterrupted stage of his journey over.

Mrs. Newbolt looked at him sharply, turning her head a little with a quick, pert movement, not unlike one of her hens.

“Is anybody sick over your way?” she asked.

She could not account for the early visit in any other132manner. People commonly came for her at all hours of the day and night when there was somebody sick and in need of a herb-wise nurse. She had helped a great many of the young ones of that community into the world, and she had eased the pains of many old ones who were quitting it. So she thought that Greening’s visit must have something to do with either life or death.

“No, nobody just azackly sick,” dodged Greening.

“Well, laws my soul, you make a mighty mystery over it! What’s the matter–can’t you talk?”

“But I can’t say, Missis Newbolt, that everybody’s just azackly well,” said he.

“Some of your folks?”

“No, not none of mine,” said Sol.

“Then whose?” she inquired impatiently.

“Isom’s,” said he.

“You don’t mean my Joe?” she asked slowly, a shadow of pain drawing her face.

“I mean Isom,” said Sol.

“Isom?” said she, relieved. “Why didn’t Joe come after me?” Before Sol could adjust his program to meet this unexpected exigency, she demanded: “Well, what’s the matter with Isom?”

“Dead,” said Sol, dropping his voice impressively.

“You don’t mean–well, shades of mercy, Isom dead! What was it–cholera-morbus?”

“Killed,” said Sol; “shot down with his own gun and killed as dead as a dornix.”

“His own gun! Well, sakes–who done it?”

“Only one man knows,” said Sol, shaking his head solemnly. “I’ll tell you how it was.”

Sol started away back at the summons to jury service, worked up to the case in which he and Isom had sat together, followed Isom then along the road home, and galloped to133overtake him. He arrived at his gate–all in his long and complete narrative–again, as he had done in reality the night past; he heard the shot in Isom’s house; he leaped to the ground; he ran. He saw a light in the kitchen of Isom’s house, but the door was closed; he knocked, and somebody called to him to enter. He opened the door and saw Isom lying there, still and bloody, money–gold money–all over him, and a man standing there beside him. There was nobody else in the room.

“Shades of mercy!” she gasped. “Who was that man?”

Sol looked at her pityingly. He put his hand to his forehead as if it gave him pain to speak.

“It was your Joe,” said he.

She sighed, greatly lightened and relieved.

“Oh, then Joe he told you how it happened?” said she.

“Ma’am,” said Sol impressively, “he said they was alone in the kitchen when it happened; he said him and Isom had some words, and Isom he reached up to pull down the gun, and the hammer caught, and it went off and shot him. That’s what Joe told me, ma’am.”

“Well, Sol Greening, you talk like you didn’t believe him!” she scorned. “If Joe said that, it’s so.”

“I hope to God it is!” said Sol, drawing a great breath.

If Sol had looked for tears, his eyes were cheated; if he had listened for screams, wailings, and moanings, his ears were disappointed. Sarah Newbolt stood straight and haughtily scornful in her kitchen door, her dark eyes bright between their snapping lids.

“Where’s Joe?” she asked sternly.

“He’s over there,” said Sol, feeling that he had made a noise like a peanut-bag which one inflates and smashes in the palm in the expectation of startling the world.

“Have they took him up?”134

“Well, you see, Bill Frost’s kind of keepin’ his eye on him till the inquest,” explained Sol.

“Yes, and I could name the man that put him up to it,” said she.

“Well, circumstantial evidence–” began Sol.

“Oh, circumstance your granny!” she stopped him pettishly.

Mrs. Newbolt emptied her pan among the scrambling fowls by turning it suddenly upside down. That done, she reached behind her and put it on the table. Her face had grown hard and severe, and her eyes were fierce.

“Wouldn’t believe my boy!” said she bitterly. “Are you going over that way now?”

“Guess I’ll be ridin’ along over.”

“Well, you tell Joe that I’ll be there as quick as shank’s horses can carry me,” she said, turning away from the door, leaving Sol to gather what pleasure he was able out of the situation.

She lost no time in primping and preparing, but was on the road before Sol had gone a quarter of a mile.

Mrs. Newbolt cut across fields, arriving at the Chase farm almost as soon as Sol Greening did on his strawberry roan. The coroner had not come when she got there; Bill Frost allowed Joe to come down to the unused parlor of old Isom’s house to talk with her. Frost showed a disposition to linger within the room and hear what was said, but she pushed him out.

“I’ll not let him run off, Bill Frost,” said she. “If he’d wanted to run, if he’d had anything to run from, he could ’a’ gone last night, couldn’t he, you dunce?”

She closed the door, and no word of what passed between mother and son reached the outside of it, although Bill Frost strained his ear against it, listening.

When the coroner arrived in the middle of the forenoon he135found no difficulty in obtaining a jury to inquire into Isom’s death. The major and minor male inhabitants of the entire neighborhood were assembled there, every qualified man of them itching to sit on the jury. As the coroner had need of but six, and these being soon chosen, the others had no further pleasure to look forward to save the inquiry into the tragedy.

After examining the wound which caused Isom’s death, the coroner had ordered the body removed from the kitchen floor. The lamp was still burning on the table, and the coroner blew it out; the gold lay scattered on the floor where it had fallen, and he gathered it up and put it in the little sack.

When the coroner went to the parlor to convene the inquest, the crowd packed after him. Those who were not able to get into the room clustered in a bunch at the door, and protruded themselves in at the windows, silent and expectant.

Joe sat with his mother on one hand, Constable Frost on the other, and across the room was Ollie, wedged between fat Mrs. Sol Greening and her bony daughter-in-law, who claimed the office of ministrants on the ground of priority above all the gasping, sympathetic, and exclaiming females who had arrived after them.

Ollie was pale and exhausted in appearance, her face drawn and bloodless, like that of one who wakes out of an anesthetic after a surgical operation upon some vital part. Her eyes were hollowed, her nostrils pinched, but there was no trace of tears upon her cheeks. The neighbors said it was dry grief, the deepest and most lasting that racks the human heart. They pitied her, so young and fair, so crushed and bowed under that sudden, dark sorrow.

Mrs. Greening had thrown something black over the young widow’s shoulders, of which she seemed unaware. It kept slipping and falling down, revealing her white dress, and Mrs. Greening kept adjusting it with motherly hand. Sitting136bent, like an old woman, Ollie twisted and wound her nervous hot fingers in her lap. Now and then she lifted her eyes to Joe’s, as if struggling to read what intention lay behind the pale calm of his face.

No wonder she looked at him wild and fearful, people said. It was more than anybody could understand, that sudden development of fierce passion and treachery in a boy who always had been so shy and steady. No wonder she gazed at him that way, poor thing!

Of course they did not dream how far they were from interpreting that look in the young widow’s eyes. There was one question in her life that morning, and one only, it seemed. It stood in front of the future and blocked all thought of it like a heavy door. Over and over it revolved in her mind. It was written in fire in her aching brain.

When they put Joe Newbolt on the witness-stand and asked him how it happened, would he stand true to his first intention and protect her, or would he betray it all?

That was what troubled Ollie. She did not know, and in his face there was no answer.

Sol Greening was the first witness. He told again to the jury of his neighbors the story which he had gone over a score of times that morning. Mrs. Newbolt nodded when he related what Joe had told him, as if to say there was no doubt about that; Joe had told her the same thing. It was true.

The coroner, a quick, sharp little man with a beard of unnatural blackness, thick eyebrows and sleek hair, helped him along with a question now and then.

“There was nobody in the room but Joe Newbolt when you arrived?”

“Nobody else–no livin’ body,” replied Sol.

“No other living body. And Joe Newbolt was standing beside the body of Isom Chase, near the head, you say?”137

“Yes, near Isom’s head.”

“With his hat in his hand, as if he had just entered the room, or was about to leave it?”

Sol nodded.

“Do you know anything about a man who had been boarding here the past week or two?”

The coroner seemed to ask this as an afterthought.

“Morgan,” said Sol, crossing his legs the other way for relief. “Yes, I knowed him.”

“Did you see him here last night?”

“No, he wasn’t here. The old lady said he stopped in at our house yesterday morning to sell me a ready-reckoner.”

Sol chuckled, perhaps over what he considered a narrow escape.

“I was over at Shelbyville, on the jury, and I wasn’t there, so he didn’t sell it. Been tryin’ to for a week. He told the old lady that was his last day here, and he was leavin’ then.”

“And about what time of night was it when you heard the shot in Isom Chase’s house, and ran over?”

“Along about first rooster-crow,” said Sol.

“And that might be about what hour?”

“Well, I’ve knowed ’em to crow at ’leven this time o’ year, and ag’in I’ve knowed ’em to put it off as late as two. But I should judge that it was about twelve when I come over here the first time last night.”

Sol was excused with that. He left the witness-chair with ponderous solemnity. The coroner’s stenographer had taken down his testimony, and was now leaning back in his chair as serenely as if unconscious of his own marvelous accomplishment of being able to write down a man’s words as fast as he could talk.

Not so to those who beheld the feat for the first time. They watched the young man, who was a ripe-cheeked chap with138pale hair, as if they expected to catch him in the fraud and pretense of it in the end, and lay bare the deceit which he practised upon the world.

The coroner was making notes of his own, stroking his black beard thoughtfully, and in the pause between witnesses the assembled neighbors had the pleasure of inspecting the parlor of dead Isom Chase which they had invaded, into which, living, he never had invited them.

Isom’s first wife had arranged that room, in the hope of her young heart, years and years ago. Its walls were papered in bridal gaiety, its colors still bright, for the full light of day seldom fell into it as now. There hung a picture of that bride’s father, a man with shaved lip and a forest of beard from ears to Adam’s apple, in a little oval frame; and there, across the room, was another, of her mother, Quakerish in look, with smooth hair and a white something on her neck and bosom, held at her throat by a portrait brooch. On the table, just under that fast-writing young man’s eyes, was a glass thing shaped like a cake cover, protecting some flowers made of human hair, and sprigs of bachelor’s button, faded now, and losing their petals.

There hung the marriage certificate of Isom and his first wife, framed in tarnished gilt which was flaking from the wood, a blue ribbon through a slit in one corner of the document, like the pendant of a seal, and there stood the horsehair-upholstered chairs, so spare of back and thin of shank that the rustics would stand rather than trust their corn-fed weight upon them. Underfoot was a store-bought carpet, as full of roses as the Elysian Fields, and over by the door lay a round, braided rag mat, into which Isom’s old wife had stitched the hunger of her heart and the brine of her lonely tears.

The coroner looked up from his little red-leather note-book.

“Joe Newbolt, step over here and be sworn,” said he.139

Joe crossed over to the witness-chair, picking his way through feet and legs. As he turned, facing the coroner, his hand upraised, Ollie looked at him steadily, her fingers fluttering and twining.

Twelve hours had made a woeful change in her. She was as gaunt as a suckling she-hound, an old terror lay lurking in her young eyes. For one hour of dread is worse than a year of weeping. One may grieve, honestly and deeply, without wearing away the cheeks or burning out the heart, for there is a soft sorrow which lies upon the soul like a deadening mist upon the autumn fields. But there is no worry without waste. One day of it will burn more of the fuel of human life than a decade of placid sorrow.

How much would he tell? Would it be all–the story of the caress in the kitchen door, the orchard’s secret, the attempt to run away from Isom–or would he shield her in some manner? If he should tell all, there sat an audience ready to snatch the tale and carry it away, and spread it abroad. Then disgrace would follow, pitiless and driving, and Morgan was not there to bear her away from it, or to mitigate its sting.

Bill Frost edged over and stood behind the witness chair. His act gave the audience a thrill. “He’s under arrest!” they whispered, sending it from ear to ear. Most of them had known it before, but there was something so full and satisfying in the words. Not once before in years had there been occasion to use them; it might be years again before another opportunity presented. They had an official sound, a sound of adventure and desperation. And so they whispered them, neighbor nodding to neighbor in deep understanding as it went round the room, like a pass-word in secret conclave: “He’s under arrest!”

There was nobody present to advise Joe of his rights. He had been accused of the crime and taken into custody, yet140they were calling on him now to give evidence which might be used against him. If he had any doubt about the legality of the proceeding, he was too certain of the outcome of the inquiry to hesitate or demur. There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind that his neighbors, men who had known him all his life, and his father before him, would acquit him of all blame in the matter and set him free. They would believe him, assuredly. Therefore, he answered cheerfully when the coroner put the usual questions concerning age and nativity. Then the coroner leaned back in his chair.

“Now, Joe, tell the jury just how it happened,” said he.

The jury looked up with a little start of guilt at the coroner’s reference to itself, presenting a great deal of whiskers and shocks of untrimmed hair, together with some reddening of the face. For the jury had been following the movements of the coroner’s stenographer, as if it, also, expected to catch him in the trick of it that would incriminate him and send him to the penitentiary for life.

“I’d been down to the barn and out by the gate, looking around,” said Joe. There he paused.

“Yes; looking around,” encouraged the coroner, believing from the lad’s appearance and slow manner that he had a dull fellow in hand. “Now, what were you looking around for, Joe?”

“I had a kind of uneasy feeling, and I wanted to see if everything was safe,” said Joe.

“Afraid of horse-thieves, or something like that?”

“Something like that,” nodded Joe.

Mrs. Newbolt, sitting very straight-backed, held her lips tight, for she was impressed with the seriousness of the occasion. Now and then she nodded, as if confirming to herself some foregone conclusion.

“Isom had left me in charge of the place, and I didn’t141want him to come back and find anything gone,” Joe explained.

“I see,” said the coroner in a friendly way. “Then what did you do?”

“I went back to the house and lit the lamp in the kitchen,” said Joe.

“How long was that before Isom came in?”

“Only a little while; ten or fifteen minutes, or maybe less.”

“And what did Isom say when he came in, Joe?”

“He said he’d kill me, he was in a temper,” Joe replied.

“You had no quarrel before he said that, Isom just burst right into the room and threatened to kill you, did he, Joe? Now, you’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m perfectly sure.”

“What had you done to send Isom off into a temper that way?”

“I hadn’t done a thing,” said Joe, meeting the coroner’s gaze honestly.

The coroner asked him concerning his position in the room, what he was doing, and whether he had anything in his hands that excited Isom when he saw it.

“My hands were as empty as they are this minute,” said Joe, but not without a little color in his cheeks when he remembered how hot and small Ollie’s hand had felt within his own.

“When did you first see this?” asked the coroner, holding up the sack with the burst corner which had lain on Isom’s breast.

The ruptured corner had been tied with a string, and the sack bulged heavily in the coroner’s hand.

“When Isom was lying on the floor after he was shot,” said Joe.

A movement of feet was audible through the room. People looked at each other, incredulity in their eyes. The coroner142returned to the incidents which led up to the shooting snapping back to that phase of the inquiry suddenly, as if in the expectation of catching Joe off his guard.

“What did he threaten to kill you for?” he asked sharply.

“Well, Isom was an unreasonable and quick-tempered man,” Joe replied.

The coroner rose to his feet in a quick start, as if he intended to leap over the table. He pointed his finger at Joe, shaking his somber beard.

“What did Isom Chase catch you at when he came into that kitchen?” he asked accusingly.

“He saw me standing there, just about to blow out the light and go to bed,” said Joe.

“What did you and Isom quarrel about last night?”

Joe did not reply at once. He seemed debating with himself over the advisability of answering at all. Then he raised his slow eyes to the coroner’s face.

“That was between him and me,” said he.

“Very well,” said the coroner shortly, resuming his seat. “You may tell the jury how Isom Chase was shot.”

Joe described Isom’s leap for the gun, the struggle he had with him to restrain him, the catching of the lock in the fork as Isom tugged at the barrel, the shot, and Isom’s death.

When he finished, the coroner bent over his note-book again, as if little interested and less impressed. Silence fell over the room. Then the coroner spoke, his head still bent over the book, not even turning his face toward the witness, his voice soft and low.

“You were alone with Isom in the kitchen when this happened?”

A flash of heat ran over Ollie’s body. After it came a sweeping wave of cold. The room whirled; the world stood on edge. Her hour had struck; the last moment of her143troubled security was speeding away. What would Joe answer to that?

“Yes,” said Joe calmly, “we were alone.”

Ollie breathed again; her heart’s constriction relaxed.

The coroner wheeled on Joe.

“Where was Mrs. Chase?” he asked.

A little murmur, as of people drawing together with whispers; a little soft scuffing of cautiously shifted feet on the carpet, followed the question. Ollie shrank back, as if wincing from pain.

“Mrs. Chase was upstairs in her room,” answered Joe.

The weight of a thousand centuries lifted from Ollie’s body. Her vision cleared. Her breath came back in measured flow to her lips, moist and refreshing.

He had not told. He was standing between her and the sharp tongues of those waiting people, already licking hungrily in their awakened suspicion, ready to sear her fair name like flames. But there was no gratitude in her heart that moment, no quick lifting of thankfulness nor understanding of the great peril which Joe had assumed for her. There was only relief, blessed, easing, cool relief. He had not told.

But the coroner was a persistent man. He was making more than an investigation out of it; he was fairly turning it into a trial, with Joe as the defendant. The people were ready to see that, and appreciate his attempts to uncover the dark motive that lay behind this deed, of which they were convinced, almost to a man, that Joe was guilty.

“Was Isom jealous of you?” asked the coroner, beginning the assault on Joe’s reserve suddenly again when it seemed that he was through. For the first time during the inquiry Joe’s voice was unsteady when he replied.

“He had no cause to be, and you’ve got no right to ask me that, either, sir!” he said.144

“Shame on you, shame on you!” said Mrs. Newbolt, leaning toward the coroner, shaking her head reprovingly.

“I’ve got the right to ask you anything that I see fit and proper, young man,” the coroner rebuked him sternly.

“Well, maybe you have,” granted Joe, drawing himself straight in the chair.

“Did Isom Chase ever find you alone with his wife?” the coroner asked.

“Now you look here, sir, if you’ll ask me questions that a gentleman ought to ask, I’ll answer you like a gentleman, but I’ll never answer such questions as that!”

There was a certain polite deference in Joe’s voice, which he felt that he owed, perhaps, to the office that the man represented, but there was a firmness above it all that was unmistakable.

“You refuse to answer any more questions, then?” said the coroner slowly, and with a significance that was almost sinister.

“I’ll answer any proper questions you care to ask me,” answered Joe.

“Very well, then. You say that you and Isom quarreled last night?”

“Yes, sir; we had a little spat.”

“A little spat,” repeated the coroner, looking around the room as if to ask the people on whose votes he depended for reelection whattheythought of a “little spat” which ended in a man’s death. There was a sort of broad humor about it which appealed to the blunt rural sense. A grin ran over their faces like a spreading wavelet on a pool. “Well now, what was the beginning of that ‘little spat’?”

“Oh, what’s that got to do with it?” asked Joe impatiently. “You asked me that before.”

“And I’m asking you again. What was that quarrel over?”145

“None of your business!” said Joe hotly, caring nothing for consequences.

“Then you refuse to answer, and persist in your refusal?”

“Well, we don’t seem to get on very well,” said Joe.

“No, we don’t,” the coroner agreed snappishly. “Stand down; that will be all.”

The listening people shifted and relaxed, leaned and whispered, turning quick eyes upon Joe, studying him with furtive wonder, as if they had discovered in him some fearful and hideous thing, which he, moving among them all his life, had kept concealed until that day.

Ollie followed him in the witness-chair. She related her story, framed on the cue that she had taken from Greening’s testimony and Joe’s substantiation of it, in low, trembling voice, and with eyes downcast. She knew nothing about the tragedy until Sol called up to her, she said, and then she was in ignorance of what had happened. Mrs. Greening had told her when she came that Isom was killed.

Ollie was asked about the book-agent boarder, as Greening had been asked. Morgan had left on the morning of the fateful day, she said, having finished his work in that part of the country. She and Joe were alone in the house that night.

The coroner spared her, no matter how far his sharp suspicions flashed into the obscurity of the relations between herself and the young bondman. The people, especially the women, approved his leniency with nods. Her testimony concluded the inquiry, and the coroner addressed the jury.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you will take into consideration the evidence you have heard, and determine, if possible, the manner in which Isom Chase came to his death, and fix the responsibility for the same. It is within your power to recommend that any person believed by you to be directly or indirectly responsible for his death, be held to the grand146jury for further investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body.”

Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life. Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and with fear.

Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet. The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other’s shoulders and then backed away.

For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day. The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.

Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and there was no doubt that it was his own.

That also was the opinion of the coroner’s jury, which walked out from its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound, inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal.147

Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic breasts. She stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression around the room.

“Joe didn’t do it, if that’s what you mean,” said she.

“Madam–” began the coroner severely.

“Yes, you little whiffet,” she burst out sharply, “you’re the one that put ’em up to do it! Joe didn’t do it, I tell you, and you men know that as well as I do. Every one of you has knowed him all his life!”

“Madam, I must ask you not to interrupt the proceedings,” said the coroner.

“Order in the court!” commanded the constable in his deepest official voice.

“Oh, shut your fool mouth, Bill Frost!” said Mrs. Newbolt scornfully.

“Never mind, Mother,” counseled Joe. “I’ll be all right. They have to do what they’re doing, I suppose.”

“Yes, they’re doin’ what that little snip-snapper with them colored whiskers tells ’em to do!” said she.

Solemn as the occasion was, a grin went round at the bald reference to a plainer fact. Even the dullest there had seen the grayish-red at the roots of the coroner’s beard. The coroner grew very red of face, and gave some orders to his stenographer, who wrote them down. He thanked the jurors and dismissed them. Bill Frost began to prepare for the journey to Shelbyville to turn Joe over to the sheriff.

The first, and most important, thing in the list of preliminaries for the journey, was the proper adjustment of Bill’s mustache. Bill roached it up with a turn of the forefinger,148using the back of it, which was rough, like a corn-cob. When he had got the ends elevated at a valiant angle, his hat firmly settled upon his head, and his suspenders tightened two inches, he touched Joe’s shoulder.

“Come on!” he ordered as gruffly and formally as he could draw his edged voice.

Joe stood, and Bill put his hand on his arm to pilot him, in all officiousness, out of the room. Mrs. Newbolt stepped in front of them as they approached.

“Joe!” she cried appealingly.

“That’s all right, Mother,” he comforted her, “everything will be cleared up and settled in a day or two. You go on home now, Mother, and look after things till I come.”

“Step out of the way, step out of the way!” said Bill with spreading impatience.

Mrs. Newbolt looked at the blustering official pityingly.

“Bill Frost, you ain’t got as much sense as you was born with!” said she. She patted Joe’s shoulder, which was as near an approach to tenderness as he ever remembered her to make.

Constable Frost fell into consultation with his adjutant, Sol Greening, as soon as he cleared the room with the prisoner. They discussed gravely in the prisoner’s hearing, for Bill kept his hand on Joe’s arm all the time, the advisability of tying him securely with a rope before starting on the journey to jail.

Joe grew indignant over this base proposal. He declared that if Bill was afraid of him he would go alone to the county-seat and give himself up to the sheriff if they would set him free. Bill was a little assured by his prisoner’s evident sincerity.

Another consultation brought them to the agreement that the best they could do, in the absence of handcuffs, was to hitch up to Isom’s buggy and make the prisoner drive. With149hands employed on the lines, he could be watched narrowly by Bill who was to take Sol’s old navy six along in his mighty hand.

Mrs. Newbolt viewed the officious constable’s preparations for the journey with many expressions of anger and disdain.

“Just look at that old fool, Bill Frost, with that revolver!” said she, turning to the neighbors, who stood silently watching. “Just as if Joe would hurt anybody, or try to run away!”

Sympathy seemed to be lacking in the crowd. Everybody was against Joe, that was attested by the glum faces and silence which met her on every hand. She was amazed at their stupidity. There they stood, people who had seen Joe grow up, people who knew that a Newbolt would give his last cent and go hungry to meet an obligation; that he would wear rags to pay his debts, as Peter had done, as Joe was doing after him; that he would work and strive night and day to keep fair his honorable name, and to preserve the honest record of the family clear and clean.

They all knew that, and they knew that a Newbolt never lied, but they hunched their backs and turned away their heads as if they thought a body was going to hit them when she spoke. It disgusted her; she felt like she could turn loose on some of them with their own records, which she had from a generation back.

She approached the buggy as Joe took up the lines and prepared to drive out of the gate.

“I don’t see why they think you done it, son, it’s so unreasonable and unneighborly of them,” said she.

“Neighborly!” said Joe, with sudden bitterness in his young voice. “What am I to them but ‘the pore folks’ boy’? They didn’t believe me, Mother, but when I get a chance to stand up before Judge Maxwell over at Shelbyville, I’ll be talking to a gentleman. A gentleman will understand.”150

That sounded like his father, she thought. It moved her with a feeling of the pride which she had reflected feebly for so many years.

“I hope so, son,” said she. “If you’re not back in a day or two, I’ll be over to Shelbyville.”

“Drive on, drive on!” ordered Bill, the old black revolver in his hand.

The crowd was impressed by that weapon, knowing its history, as everybody did. Greening’s more or less honorable father had carried it with him when he rode in the train of Quantrell, the infamous bushwhacker. It was the old man’s boast to his dying day that he had exterminated a family of father and five sons in the raid upon Lawrence with that old weapon, without recharging it.

Joe drove through the open gate without a look behind him. His face was pale, his heart was sick with the humiliation of that day. But he felt that it was only a temporary cloud into which he had stepped, and that clearing would come again in a little while. It was inconceivable to him how anybody could be so foolish as to believe, or even suspect, that he had murdered Isom Chase.

The assembled people having heard all there was to hear, and seen all there was to see at the gate, began to straggle back to the farmhouse to gossip, to gape, and exclaim. To Greening and his family had fallen the office of comforting the widow and arranging for the burial, and now Sol had many offers to sit up with the corpse that night.

Mrs. Newbolt stood at the roadside, looking after the conveyance which was taking her son away to jail, until a bend behind a tall hedge hid it from her eyes. She made no further attempt to find sympathy or support among her neighbors, who looked at her curiously as she stood there, and turned away selfishly when she faced them.

Back over the road that she had hurried along that morning151she trudged, slowly and without spirit, her feet like stones. As she went, she tried to arrange the day’s happenings in her mind. All was confusion there. The one plain thing, the thing that persisted and obtruded, was that they had arrested Joe on a charge that was at once hideous and unjust.

Evening was falling when she reached the turn of the road and looked ahead to her home. She had no heart for supper, no heart to lift the latch of the kitchen door and enter there. There was no desire in her heart but for her son, and no comfort in the prospect of her oncoming night.

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