FullReads

“I’ve come to tell what I know about the shootin’. I saw it,” she faltered.

The somnambulistic young man shut one eye, and inclined his ear toward her without turning his head.

“Shooting? What shooting?”

“Up in Sawpit Canon–Mr. Sterling done it–but I saw it–nobody knows it, though.” The words came in short, palpitating sentences that died away helplessly.

Her listener hesitated for an instant, scratching the blonde plush of his cropped scalp with his lead-pencil. Then he stepped forward and kicked one of the double doors open, holding it with his automatic foot.

“Bawb! oh, Bawb! ” he called; “‘m yer.”

A short fat man, with an unbuttoned vest and a general air of excessive perspiration, waddled past the bailiff and confronted Melissa. He smiled when he saw her, displaying an upper row of teeth heavily trimmed with gold, a style of personal adornment which impressed Melissa anew with the vagaries of masculine city taste.

“Witness in the Withrow murder case, pros’cuting ‘torney,” said the bailiff over his shoulder, by way of introduction, as he disappeared through the door.

Melissa looked at the newcomer, trembling and dumb.

“Come in here, my girl,” he said, steaming ahead of her through a door in front of them; “come right in here. Is it pretty hot up your way?”

“Yes, sir,” she quavered, not taking the chair he cleared for her. “I come down to tell about the shootin’: I’d ought to ‘a’ told before, but I was scared. Mr. Sterling done it, but paw was mad; he picked up Mr. Sterling’s gun and tried to kill ‘im,–I saw it all. I was hid in the sycamores. You hadn’t ought to hang ‘im or do anything to ‘im: he couldn’t help it.”

The prosecuting attorney smiled his broad, gilt-edged, comfortable smile, and laid his pudgy hand reassuringly on Melissa’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, my little girl,” he said. “We’re not going to hang Mr. Sterling this time; he was discharged this afternoon; but he’ll be obliged to you, all the same. He’s over at the hotel taking a nap. You just run along home, and the next time don’t be afraid to tell what you know.”

The girl turned away silently, and went down the stairs and out into the street. She stood still a moment on the hot pavement, looking in the direction of the hotel in which the man for whom she had made her fruitless journey was sleeping. Then she set her face patiently toward home. The reflection from the pavement seemed to blind her; she felt suddenly faint and tired, and it was with a great throb of relief that she heard a familiar voice at her elbow, and turned with a little tearless sob to Lysander.

VIII.

The Worthingtons’ private parlor in the Rideau House was hot and close, although a fog had drifted in at nightfall and cooled the outside air. Two of its occupants, however, were totally unmindful of the heat and the mingled odors of upholstery, gas, and varnish that prevailed within its highly decorated walls. The third, a compact, elderly, prosperous-looking gentleman, whose face wore a slight cloud of ennui, stood by the open window gazing out, not so much from a desire to see what was going on outside as from a good-natured unwillingness to see what was taking place within.

Mr. Frederick Sterling, a shade paler and several shades graver than of old, was looking at the elderly gentleman’s daughter in an unmistakable way; and the daughter herself, a fair creature, with the fairness of youth and health and plenty, was returning his gaze with one that was equally unmistakable.

“Do you mean to tell me, Frederick, that the poor thing walked all that distance in that intolerable heat?”

The young man nodded dismally.

“That’s what they say, Annette. It makes one feel like a beast.”

“I don’t see why you need say that, Frederick. I’m sure they ought to have done something, after the awful danger you were in.” The young woman swept toward him, with one arm outstretched, and then receded, and let her hand fall on the back of a chair, as her father yawned audibly.