A minute later they heard
her scream, and she ran back with the open paper in her hands.

"He did not do it! He is crazy! They have found the murderer!"

Silas fixed an incredulous, questioning stare upon his wife, and then
turned quickly toward his brother. As for Joseph, at first and for
several moments, he gave no sign that he had heard at all. Then he
slowly raised his eyes to his brother's face with a deliberate, cruel
gaze of contemptuous sarcasm and cold aversion. The first effect of this
great relief was to flood his mind with bitter wrath at those who had
done him the great wrong from which, no thanks to them, he had been
rescued.

Mrs. Kilgore hastily read aloud, in a breathless voice, the newspaper
account It seemed that two tramps had taken refuge in the barn from
the storm that had raged the night of the murder, and getting into some
quarrel before morning, one had stabbed the other and fled, only to be
captured two days later and confess everything. When Mrs. Kilgore ceased
reading, Joseph said:--

"It must be a great disappointment for you that they are not going to
hang me for it. I sincerely condole with you."

Mrs. Kilgore cried, "Oh, don't!" and Silas made a gesture of
deprecation, but both felt that Joseph had a right to revile them as he
chose, and they had no right to complain. But he, even while he could
not deny himself the gratification of a little cruel reproach, knew that
they were not to be blamed, that they had been as much the victims of
a fatality as himself, and that this was one of those peculiarly
exasperating wrongs which do not leave the sufferer even the
satisfaction of being angry. Soon he got up and walked across the room,
stretched himself, drew his hand over his forehead, and said:--

"I feel as if I had just been dug up after being buried alive."

At this sign of returning equanimity, Silas took courage and ventured to
say:--

"I know we 've been a pair of crazy fools, Joe, but you 're a little
to blame. What's made you act so queerly? You won't deny that you have
acted so?"

Joseph smiled,--one does n't appreciate the pure luxury of a smile
until he has been deprived of it for a while,--lit a cigar, sat down
with his legs over the arm of his arm-chair,--he had not indulged in an
unconstrained posture for two days,--and told his side of the story.
He explained how, thanks to that tale he was reading, and the ghastly
reverie it suggested, his nerves were all on edge w