no-account step-brother of Joe's! What if he IS a hired hand on
the Tocsin? He'd better give up his job and quit, than do what he's
done to help make the town think hard of Joe. And what IS he? Why,
he's worse than Cory. When that Claudine Fear first came here, 'Gene
Bantry was hangin' around her himself. Joe knew it and he'd never tell,
but I will. I saw 'em buggy-ridin' out near Beaver Beach and she
slapped his face fer him. It ought to be TOLD!"

"I didn't know that Joe knew--that!" Eugene stammered huskily. "It
was--it was--a long time ago--"

"If you understood Joe," she said, in a low voice, "you would know that
before these men leave this house, he will have their promise never to
tell."

His eyes fell miserably, then lifted again; but in her clear and
unbearable gaze there shone such a flame of scorn as he could not
endure to look upon. For the first time in his life he saw a true light
upon himself, and though the vision was darkling, the revelation was
complete.

"Heaven pity you!" she whispered.

Eugene found himself alone, and stumbled away, his glance not lifted.
He passed his own home without looking up, and did not see his mother
beckoning frantically from a window. She ran to the door and called
him. He did not hear her, but went on toward the Tocsin office with
his head still bent.

XXI

NORBERT WAITS FOR JOE

There was meat for gossip a plenty in Canaan that afternoon and
evening; there were rumors that ran from kitchen to parlor, and rumors
that ran from parlor to kitchen; speculations that detained housewives
in talk across front gates; wonderings that held cooks in converse over
shadeless back fences in spite of the heat; and canards that brought
Main Street clerks running to the shop doors to stare up and down the
sidewalks. Out of the confusion of report, the judicious were able by
evenfall to extract a fair history of this day of revolution. There
remained no doubt that Joe Louden was in attendance at the death-bed of
Eskew Arp, and somehow it came to be known that Colonel Flitcroft,
Squire Buckalew, and Peter Bradbury had shaken hands with Joe and
declared themselves his friends. There were those (particularly among
the relatives of the hoary trio) who expressed the opinion that the
Colonel and his comrades were too old to be responsible and a
commission ought to sit on them; nevertheless, some echoes of Eskew's
last "argument" to the conclave had sounded in the town an