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 morning she 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.

CHAPTER IX

THE SEALED ENVELOPE

In the light of Joe's reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and
stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between
himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been
found in the burst bag on Isom's breast; and Joe's declaration that he
had not