clear the name of
an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"

Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."

And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style--which was a very dramatic
and moving style indeed--of the circumstances, as recalled by old
residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
cloud from his life.

"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
I'd have this Frenchman Balzac backed clear off the boards when it came
to describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've