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Now between his racking sobs he began to pray aloud a broken prayer. He did not pray for divine forgiveness of the thing he meant to do. By the narrow tenets of his faith his soul, through the deliberate act of his hands, would go forth from the body, doomed to everlasting torment. It did not appear feasible to him that God might understand. The God he believed in was a stern God of punishments, sitting in strict judgment upon mortal transgressions. So he prayed not for mercy but for strength to carry him through that which faced him.

In a cupboard in the inner room was a single-barreled, muzzle-loading fowling piece made at Liege, in Belgium, many years before. His predecessor in the station had left it behind him and Pratt had succeeded to possession of it. He knew how to load and fire and clean it. Occasionally he had used it in shooting at wood pigeons. He went inside and took it from its place and charged it with black powder from an old-fashioned metal powder flask and with heavy shot from a worn shot pouch. For wadding he tore apart the front page of the uppermost copy of the file of Daily Republicans lying upon the shelf where he had placed them less than half an hour before.

He rammed the charge home, with wadding between powder and shot, with more wadding on top of the shot. He withdrew the ramrod and cast it aside; he brought the hammer back to full cock and fixed a cap upon the nipple. He stood the gun upright upon the floor and leaned forward, the muzzle against his upper chest, the stock braced against the edge of a crack in the planking. With the great toe of his bare right foot he pressed the trigger.

Two natives, passing, heard the booming report and ran in to see what had caused it. They quickly ran out again and brought white men. After the body had been moved from where it had fallen but before the scanty personal belongings of the dead man had been sealed up and before the store had been put under lock and key, the white men made search about the place for any farewell message, or lacking that, any physical evidence that might furnish a possible explanation for the cause of the suicide. They found neither message nor clew. In searching about one of them came upon a tattered scrap of newspaper. Its burnt edges and its general singed condition proved that it had been used for wadding. The force of the discharge had blown it out, almost intact, to flutter off into a corner.

Moved by a curiosity natural under the circumstances the finder deciphered the smudged and blackened reading that he found upon the two surfaces of the fragment. On one side appeared part of an advertisement of a merchant tailor; on the other side he made out this, which he read with a casual interest only:

“The Editor regrets exceedingly that in yesterday’s issue he was victimised and imposed upon to the extent of printing an erroneous and entirely incorrect item, for which mistake we now hasten to make prompt correction and due amends. Some person unknown, taking advantage of the fact that yesterday was April the first, or All Fools’ Day, telephoned to our sanctum the information that Miss Hetty Stowe, the well-known teacher, of near here, had been married yesterday morning at Rutland to a Mr. Gabriel Eno, of Vergennes. Accepting the report in good faith, this paper printed it in good faith, as an item of news. We now learn that the entire story was untrue, being, not to mince words, a lie manufactured out of the whole cloth. We learn that Miss Stowe knows the gentleman whose name was given as bridegroom but very slightly, having met him but once, as we are now reliably informed. In fact, nothing could be farther from her thoughts than marriage with the gentleman in question, he being considerably her junior in years. The cruelty of the hoax thus perpetrated is increased by the fact that for the past several days Miss Stowe has been confined to the bed of illness, suffering from a sudden and violent attack of fever, which illness has naturally been enhanced by the embarrassing position in which she has been placed through the act of an anonymous practical joker. Such jokes are entirely out of place and cannot be too strongly reprehended. In correcting this falsehood the Daily Republican wishes to state that the perpetrator of the same is deserving of severe—-“

Here the fragment was torn across.

To the tale there is no moral unless it be an indirect moral to be derived from contemplation of a strange contradiction in our modern life, to wit: That practical burglary is by law sternly discouraged and practical joking is not.