ed broadly and as Nick stopped to light a fresh cigar
Tom said:

"I sure thought, Nick, that you'd never get back alive, for I knew
you-all must have gone off some place you'd no business to go alone,
and I'd have started off on a blind hunt for you in another day."

"Well, I run across him by accident on the street one evening, and you
ought to have seen him turn white and shaky when I stepped up and
spoke to him. The boy's nerve's all gone, and you know he used to have
the devil's own grit. You-all saw how he acted when I got him into the
court room this afternoon. I reckon it takes all the sand out of a
fellow to live in the dark and be all the time afraid something's
goin' to drop, the way he's done all summer.

"'Hullo, Will,' says I, and then I took pity on him and showed my
hand right from the start. But I'd sized him up all in a minute, and I
reckoned that would work best anyway. 'I haven't got any warrant for
you,' says I, 'and I don't mean to arrest you, and I've sworn to Amada
Garcia not to let any harm happen to you, but I've got a proposition I
want to talk over with you, if you'll take me somewheres where we can
be private.' For I didn't mean to let him out of my sight again until
I got him into the court room at Plumas, and I didn't, neither. He
took me to his room and we chinned the thing over for two or three
hours. He knew that everybody thought he was dead and that his body
had been found, and that Emerson was being tried for his murder. But
he'd started out on that lay and he was afraid to go back on it.

"He told me the whole story, on my promise to keep it secret. I told
him I'd have to tell it to you-all, because Emerson had the right to
know it, and Tommy would be sure to go makin' some bad break if he
didn't know it, but that I'd give him my word of honor it shouldn't go
outside of us three. He was just gone plum' crazy on Amada, and one
day he was at her house when a justice of the peace from Muletown came
along. The old folks were out in the fields and for a good, plump fee
the justice married them right then and there. They had no witnesses,
and it happened that the justice died in a week--it was old Crowby,
from Muletown, you remember him. Will was deathly afraid his father
would find it out and be bull roaring mad about it and hist him out
of the country, and so he didn't dare say a word about it, and he made
Amada keep it secret, too. Well, the boy's young, and I reckon that's
some exc