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PAGE 2

Two Days’ Solitary Imprisonment
by [?]

He imagined the first beginnings of suspicion; he saw it filming the eyes of his acquaintances, then of his friends, and at last sicklying over the face even of his brother Silas. In fancy he made frantic attempts to regain the confidence of his friends, to break through the impalpable, impenetrable barrier which the first stir of suspicion had put between their minds and his. He cried, he begged, he pleaded. But in vain, all in vain. Suspicion had made his appeals and adjurations sound even to his friends as strange and meaningless as the Babel-builders’ words of a sudden became to each other. The yellow badge of suspicion once upon him, all men kept afar, as if he were a fever-ship in quarantine. No solitary imprisonment in a cell of stone could so utterly exclude him from the fellowship of men as the invisible walls of this dungeon of suspicion. And at last he saw himself giving up the hopeless struggle, yielding to his fate in dumb despair, only praying that the end might come speedily, perhaps even reduced to the abject-ness of confessing the crime he had not committed, in order that he might at least have the pity of men, since he could not regain their confidence. And so strongly had this vision taken hold on him that his breath came irregularly, and his forehead was damp as he drew his hand across it.

As has been intimated, it was Mr. Joseph Kil-gore’s very bad habit to waste his nervous tissue in the conscientiously minute elaboration of such painful imaginary situations as that above described, and in his present experience there was nothing particularly novel or extraordinary for him. It was the occurrence of a singular coincidence between this internal experience and a wholly independent course of actual events, which made that waking nightmare the beginning of a somewhat remarkable comedy, or, more properly, a tragedy, of errors. For, as Joseph lay back in his chair, in a state of nervous exhaustion and moral collapse, the parlor-door was thrown open, and Mrs. Silas Kilgore, his sister-in-law, burst into the room. She was quite pale, and her black eyes were fixed on Joseph’s with the eager intensity, as if seeking moral support, noticeable in those who communicate startling news which they have not had time to digest.

The effect of this apparition upon Joseph in his unstrung condition may be readily imagined. He sprang up, much paler than Mrs. Kilgore, his lips apart, and his eyes staring with the premonition of something shocking. These symptoms of extraordinary excitement even before she had spoken, and this air as if he had expected a shocking revelation, recurred to her mind later, in connection with other circumstances, but just now she was too full of her intelligence to dwell on anything else.

“A man was murdered in our barn last night. They ‘ve found the body!” she exclaimed.

As the meaning of her words broke on him, Joseph was filled with that sort of mental confusion which one experiences when the scene or circumstances of a dream recur in actual life. Was he still dreaming that ghostly vision of suspicion and the death-trap of circumstances? Was this a mere continuation of it? No, he was awake; his sister-in-law standing there, with pallid face and staring eyes, was not an apparition. The horrid, fatal reality which he had been imagining was actually upon him.

“I did not do it!” dropped from his ashen lips.

“You do it? Are you crazy? Who said anything about your doing it?” cried the astounded woman.

The ring of genuine amazement in her voice was scarcely needed to recall Joseph to the practical bearing of his surroundings, and break the spell of superstitious dread. The sound of his own words had done it. With a powerful effort he regained something like self-control, and said, with a forced laugh:–

“What an absurd thing for me to say! I don’t know what I could have been thinking of. Very odd, was it not? But, dear me! a man murdered in our barn? You don’t tell me! How terrible!”