black frown; he lifted his
lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept straight
on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American.
The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--and the
next moment he and I were alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day,
and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives
and children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and
three things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender
light glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and
in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time
I ever saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and
then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently
heard nothing that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly
did not know, by either sight or hearing, when I left the room.

When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said, abruptly--

'I will tell you my story.'

A DYING MAN S CONFESSION

Then he went on as follows:--

I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going
to die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon,
too. You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you
find opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange
experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my
history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you will
stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will
willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.

Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to
settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I
had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely
good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.

One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden
lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and o