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“Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set of galley proofs pulled and I stuck ’em in my pocket and I put out for the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn’t want to trust either of the reporters with this job. They’re both good, smart, likely boys; but, at that, they’re only boys, and I didn’t know how they’d go at this thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.

“He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: ‘You’ll pardon me, Mr. Stackpole, but I’ve come to ask you a question and then to show you something. Did you,’ I says, ‘ever know a man named A. Hamilton Bledsoe?’

“He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house without answering me. I suppose it’d been so long since he had anybody calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter memories–not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing, being always with him, anyway–may have jolted him pretty hard. But if he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He turned round and came back.

“‘Yes,’ he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him against his will, ‘I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where’–he checked himself up, here–‘he lived,’ he says, ‘in this county at one time. I knew him then.’

“‘That being so,’ I says, ‘I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you to read these galley proofs,’ and I handed them over and he read them through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he’d spoken a volume he couldn’t have told me any clearer what was passing through his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in a flash, you’ll find you can’t describe it afterwards, but you’re never going to forget it. And another thing you’ll find is that there is nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing that you want to say.

“I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I’d gone out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy piece out of him–what we call in this business heart-interest stuff. All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, ‘No, sir; but I thank you–from the bottom of my heart I thank you.’ And then he shook hands with me–shook hands with me like a man who’d forgotten almost how ’twas done–and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him, and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned into a resurrection.”

Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but he hadn’t. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following hard upon a denouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite headlining phrases: “Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery.”