fe to
go rowing on the river at a season when it was still cold; she had
screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head;
he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from
the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to
show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that
he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when
he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station
was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. According to his own
story, the boat had tipped over when the moon was behind a cloud and he
had lost all trace of his wife after her first struggle in the water.
But people laughed at this story, and as for myself, I wondered who was
the creature I had seen in the orchard, mixed up with the queer shadows
and running from tree to tree like a frightened ape. Little knowing what
was to happen, I wondered whether I should ever see John Chalmers, the
accused man, before the law had made way with him.

I never doubted that the law would hesitate, till the day the Judge came
home to dinner at six in the evening and told me that the case had been
in the jury's hands for three hours already. How well I remember the
long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild
birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our
dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too
beautiful to be befouled by the hates of little men, whose appetites
were no more important than the appetites of the caterpillars eating the
green foliage. But I could see the hates of men reflected in the Judge's
face.

"Surely they would not let him go, sir?" said I.

He only shook his head, and later he went out without once asking for
the baby, and I knew when I heard the gate slam that things had not gone
well at the court-house.

At eight o'clock that night I was on the porch when a man came tearing
up to the fence, almost fell off a bicycle, vaulted the rail, and came
running over the grass.

"Got a telephone?" he said.

"Yes," said I, with the answer frightened out of me.

"Gimme a match," said he. "I've gotter have a cigarette. Hold on, I got
one."

He lit it. In the flare I saw it was the red-haired, freckled reporter
and his green eyes was all alive again.

Before I could stop him, he had pushed his way ahead of me into the
Judge's study and was at the