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“He did not do it! He is crazy! They have found the murderer!”

Silas fixed an incredulous, questioning stare upon his wife, and then turned quickly toward his brother. As for Joseph, at first and for several moments, he gave no sign that he had heard at all. Then he slowly raised his eyes to his brother’s face with a deliberate, cruel gaze of contemptuous sarcasm and cold aversion. The first effect of this great relief was to flood his mind with bitter wrath at those who had done him the great wrong from which, no thanks to them, he had been rescued.

Mrs. Kilgore hastily read aloud, in a breathless voice, the newspaper account It seemed that two tramps had taken refuge in the barn from the storm that had raged the night of the murder, and getting into some quarrel before morning, one had stabbed the other and fled, only to be captured two days later and confess everything. When Mrs. Kilgore ceased reading, Joseph said:–

“It must be a great disappointment for you that they are not going to hang me for it. I sincerely condole with you.”

Mrs. Kilgore cried, “Oh, don’t!” and Silas made a gesture of deprecation, but both felt that Joseph had a right to revile them as he chose, and they had no right to complain. But he, even while he could not deny himself the gratification of a little cruel reproach, knew that they were not to be blamed, that they had been as much the victims of a fatality as himself, and that this was one of those peculiarly exasperating wrongs which do not leave the sufferer even the satisfaction of being angry. Soon he got up and walked across the room, stretched himself, drew his hand over his forehead, and said:–

“I feel as if I had just been dug up after being buried alive.”

At this sign of returning equanimity, Silas took courage and ventured to say:–

“I know we ‘ve been a pair of crazy fools, Joe, but you ‘re a little to blame. What’s made you act so queerly? You won’t deny that you have acted so?”

Joseph smiled,–one does n’t appreciate the pure luxury of a smile until he has been deprived of it for a while,–lit a cigar, sat down with his legs over the arm of his arm-chair,–he had not indulged in an unconstrained posture for two days,–and told his side of the story. He explained how, thanks to that tale he was reading, and the ghastly reverie it suggested, his nerves were all on edge when Mrs. Kilgore burst in with a piece of news whose extraordinary coincidence with his train of thought had momentarily thrown him off his balance; and he tried to make them see that, after that first scene, all the rest was a logical sequence.

Mrs. Kilgore, by virtue of her finer feminine nervous organization, understood him so readily that he saw he had made a mistake in not unbosoming himself to her at first. But Silas evidently did not so easily take his idea.

“But why did n’t you just tell us that you had n’t done it, and end the misunderstanding at one blow?” he asked.

“Why, don’t you see,” replied Joseph, “that to deny a thing before you are distinctly suspected of it is to suggest suspicion; while to deny it afterward, unless you have proof to offer, is useless?”

“What should we have come to but for the capture of the real murderer?” cried Mrs. Kilgore, with a shudder.