ge as true, and only tried
to extenuate the offense on the ground that the circumstances made the
temptation a very great one, and that the motive was not mercenary.
Others stood out that it would yet be discovered that Plausaby had stolen
the warrant, until half-a-dozen people remembered that Plausaby himself
had been in Red Owl at that very time--he had spent a week there laying
out a marshy shore in town lots down to the low-water mark, and also
laying out the summit of a bluff three hundred and fifty feet high and
sixty degrees steep. These sky and water lots were afterward sold to
confiding Eastern speculators, and a year or two later the owner of the
water privileges rowed all over his lots in a skiff. Whether the other
purchaser used a balloon to reach his is not known. But the operation of
staking out these ineligible "additions" to the city of Red Owl had
attracted much attention, and consequently Plausaby's _alibi_ was readily
established. So that the two or three who still believed Albert innocent
did so by "naked faith," and when questioned about it, shook their heads,
and said that it was a great mystery. They could not understand it, but
they did not believe him guilty. Isabel Marlay believed in Albert's
innocence as she believed the hard passages in the catechism. She knew
it, she believed it, she could not prove it, but she would not hear to
anything else. She was sure of his innocence, and that was enough. For
when a woman of that sort believes anything, she believes in spite of all
her senses and all reason. What are the laws of evidence to her! She
believes with the _heart_.

Poor Mrs. Plausaby, too, sat down in a dumb despair, and wept and
complained and declared that she knew her Albert had notions and such
things, but people with such notions wouldn't do anything naughty. Albert
wouldn't, she knew. He hadn't done any harm, and they couldn't find out
that he had. Katy was gone, and now Albert was in trouble, and she didn't
know what to do. She thought Isa might do something, and not let all
these troubles come on her in this way. For the poor woman had come to
depend on Isa not only in weighty matters, such as dresses and bonnets,
but also in all the other affairs of life. And it seemed to her a
grievous wrong that Isabel, who had saved her from so many troubles,
should not have kept Katy from drowning and Albert from prison.

The chief trouble in the mind of Albert was not the probability of
impri