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Lysander pressed the tobacco into his cob pipe, and scratched a match on the sole of his boot.

“I think they’ve been middlin’ fair,” he said, between puffs, “fixin’ up that water business. It’s my opinion the young feller’s at the bottom of it,–they say his father’s well off; ‘t enny rate, it’s fixed, an’ you’re better off ‘n you wuz,–exceptin’, uv course, your affliction, an’ that can’t be helped.” The man composed his voice very much as he would have straightened a corpse in which he had no personal interest. “I’m in fer shuttin’ up.”

“They don’t seem to want you to shut up,” fretted his mother-in-law. “They’ve s’peenied you.”

“They’re welcome to all I know; ’tain’t much, an’ ‘t won’t help nor hender, as I c’n see, but such as it is, they kin hev it an’ welcome.”

Lysander stood in the doorway, with his hat on the back of his head. He tilted it over his eyes, as he made this avowal, and sauntered toward the stable, with his head thrown back, peering from under the brim, as if its inconvenient position were a matter entirely beyond his control.

Melissa was washing dishes at a table in the corner of the kitchen. She hurried a little, trembling in her eagerness to speak to Lysander alone. She carried the dishpan to the kitchen door to empty it, and the chickens came scuttling with half-flying strides from the shade of the geraniums where they were dusting themselves, and then fled with a chorus of dismayed squawks as the dish-water splashed among them. The girl hung the pan on a nail outside, and flung her apron over her head. She could see Lysander’s tilted hat moving among the low blue gums beside the shed. She drew the folds of her apron forward to shade her face, and went down the path with a studied unconcern that sat as ill upon her as haste. Lysander was mending the cultivator; he looked up, but not as high as her face.

“‘Llo, M’lissy,” he said, as kindly as was compatible with a rusty bit of wire between his teeth.

The girl leaned against the shaded side of a stack of baled barley hay.

“Lysander,” she began quaveringly, “Lysander, if you’d seen paw shot, an’ knowed all about it, could they make you tell–would you think you’d ought to tell?” She hurried her questions as they had been crowding in her sore conscience. “I mean, of course, if you’d seen it, Lysander.”

Her brother-in-law straightened himself, and set his hat on the back of his head without speaking. Melissa could feel him looking at her curiously.

“Of course, that’s all I mean, Lysander,–just if you’d seen it; would you tell?” she faltered.

“M’lissy,” said the man impressively, “if I’d seen my own paw killed, an’ nobody asked me to tell, I’d keep my mouth most piously shut; that’s what I’d do.”

“But if he was mad, Sandy, an’ tried to kill somebody else, and, oh,”–her voice broke into a piteous wail,–“if they wuz thinkun’ o’ hangin’ ‘im!”

“They ain’t a-goin’ to hang nobody, M’lissy,” said Lysander confidently,–“hangin’ has gone out o’ fashion. And I don’t think it’s becomin’ fer the fam’ly to interfere, especially the women folks; besides, we don’t none of us know nothin’ about it, you see. Don’t you fret about things you don’t know nothin’ about. The law’ll have to take its course, M’lissy. That young feller’s goin’ to git off reasonable,–very reasonable, indeed, considerin’.”

Melissa rubbed her feet in the loose straw, restless and uncomforted.

“When’s the trial, Lysander?” she asked, after a little pause, during which her companion resumed his encounter with the rusty wire he was straightening.

“The trial, M’lissy, is set for tuhmorruh,” Lysander replied, a trifle oracularly. “I’m a-goin’ down because they’ve sent fer me; if they hadn’t ‘a’ sent, I wouldn’t ‘a’ gone. I don’t know nothin’ exceptin’ that yer paw had one of his spells,”–inebriety was always thus decorously cloaked in Lysander’s domestic conversation,–“an’ went off up the canon that mornin’ r’arin’ mad about the spring. Of course they don’t know that’s all I know,–if they knowed it, perhaps they wouldn’t want me; but if they hadn’t sent fer me, you can bet I’d stick at home closer’n a scale-bug to an orange-tree, Melissy, perticular if I was a young girl, an’ didn’t know nothin’ whatever about the hull fracas. An’ young girls ain’t expected to know about such things; it ain’t proper fer ’em, especially when they’re members of the fam’ly.”