roat again, not through any effort to gain time for my
thoughts, but to feel for a moment the satisfaction arising from the
intent attitude of my audience, particularly my wife, who had leaned
forward and was looking at me with an expression of startled surprise.

"Ashley Turner must have had a pretty fine-looking farm here thirty
years or so ago," I continued, "when he brought his wife to it. This
barn was new then. But he was a ne'er-do-well, with nothing to be said
in his favor, unless you admit his fame as a practical joker. Strange
how the ne'er-do-well is often equipped with an extravagant sense of
humor! Turner had a considerable retinue among the riffraff boys of the
neighborhood, who made this barn a noisy rendezvous and followed his
hints in much whimsical mischief. But he committed most of his practical
jokes when drunk, and in his sober moments he abused his family and let
his wife struggle to keep up the acres, assisted only by a
half-competent man of all work. Finally he took to roving. No one knew
how he got pocket-money; his wife could not have given him any. Then
someone discovered that he was going over to Creed's now and then, and
everything was explained."

This concise data of mine was evidently not holding the close attention
of my youthful audience. They annoyed me by frequent pranks and
whisperings. No one could have been more surprised at my glibness than I
myself, except perhaps my wife, whose attitude of strained attention had
not relaxed. I resumed my story.

"Peter Creed was a good old-fashioned usurer of the worst type. He went
to church regularly one day in the week and gouged his neighbors--any
that he could get into his clutches--on the other six. He must have been
lending Turner drinking money, and everyone knew what the security must
be.

"At last there came a day when the long-suffering wife revolted. Turner
had come home extra drunk and in his most maudlin humor. Probably he
attempted some drunken prank upon his over-taxed helpmate. Old Ike, the
hired man, said that he thought Turner had rigged up some scare for her
in the barn and that he had never heard anything so much like straight
talking from his mistress, either before or since, and he was working in
the woodshed at the time, with the door shut. Shortly after that tirade
Ashley Turner disappeared, and no one saw or heard of him or thought
about him for a couple of years except when the sight of his
tired-looking wife and s