In the light of Joe’s reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been found in the burst bag on Isom’s breast; and Joe’s declaration that he had not seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of that community believed the verdict of the coroner’s jury to be just.

This refusal of Joe’s to talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter’s death. But it looked more like bull-headedness to them.

“Don’t the darned fool know he’s pokin’ his head under the gallus?” they asked.

What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin’ there in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that there money come from, gentlemen? That’s what I want you to tell me!

Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to group, and which nobody could answer, as they stood discussing it after Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving them the weight of his experience.

“That Newbolt’s deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen,” he said, shaking his serious whiskers. “There’s a lot more behind this case than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was planned away ahead. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anybody on the witness-stand 153 as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt boy. He knew just what to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we’ll fetch it out of him–or somebody else.”

As men went home to take up their neglected tasks, they talked it all over. They wondered what Joe would have done with that money if he had succeeded in getting away with it; whether he would have made it out of the country, or whether the invincible Bill Frost, keen on his scent as a fox-hound, would have pursued him and brought him back.

They wondered how high they built the gallows to hang a man, and discussed the probability of the event being public. They speculated on the manner in which Joe would go to his death, whether boldly, with his head up that way, or cringing and afraid, his proud heart and spirit broken, and whether he would confess at the end or carry his secret with him to the grave. Then they branched off into discussions of the pain of hanging, and wondered whether it was a “more horribler” death than drowning or burning in a haystack, or from eating pounded glass.

It was a great, moving, awakening sensation in the countryside, that taking off of Isom Chase by a mysterious midnight shot. It pulled people up out of the drowse of a generation, and set them talking as they had not talked in twenty years. Their sluggish brains were heated by it, their sleeping hearts quickened.

People were of the undivided opinion that Isom had caught Joe robbing him, and that Joe had shot him in the fear of punishment for the theft. Perhaps it is because chivalry is such a rare quality among the business activities of this life, that none of them believed he was shielding Isom’s wife, and that he was innocent of any wrong himself. They did not approve the attempt of the coroner to drag her into it. The shrewd insight of the little man cost him a good many votes that day. 154

Joe Newbolt could very well be a robber, they said, for all his life had prepared him for a fall before the temptation of money. He could very well be a robber, indeed, and there was no room for him to turn out anything nobler, for wasn’t he the pore folks’ boy?

Ollie was almost as short in her realization of what Joe had done for her as those who knew nothing at all of his motive of silence. In the relief of her escape from public disclosure of her intrigue with Morgan, she enjoyed a luxurious relaxation. It was like sleep after long watching.

She did not understand the peril in which Joe stood on her account, nor consider that the future still held for both of them a trial which would test Joe’s strength as the corrosive tooth of acid challenges the purity of gold. It was enough for her that sunny afternoon, and sufficient to her shallow soul, to know that she was safe. She lay warm and restful in her bed while the neighbor women set the house to rights, and the men moved Isom’s body into the parlor to wait for the coffin which Sol Greening had gone after to the county-seat.

Ollie watched the little warm white clouds against the blue of the October sky, and thought of the fleecy soft things which a mother loves to swaddle her baby in; she watched the shadow of falling leaves upon the floor, blowing past her window on the slant sunbeams.

She was safe!

Joe was accused, but she seemed to hold that a trivial incident in an exciting day. It would pass; he would clear himself, as he deserved to be cleared, and then, when Morgan came back for her and carried her away into his world, everything would be in tune.

Perhaps it was because she knew that Joe was innocent that his accusation appeared so untenable and trivial to her. At any rate, the lawyers over at Shelbyville–wasn’t their 155 cunning known around the world–could get him off. If it came to that, she would see that he had a good one, as good as money could employ. Joe had stood by her; she would stand by Joe. That was the extent of her concern that afternoon.

It was pleasant to stretch there in peace, with no task before her, no rude summons to arise and work. Isom would call her no more at dawn; his voice would be silent in that house forever more. There was no regret in the thought, no pang, no pain.

As one lives his life, so he must be pitied in death. Soft deeds father soft memories. There never was but one man who rose with the recollection of pleasant dreams from pillowing his head upon a stone, and that man was under the hand of God. Isom Chase had planted bitterness; his memory was gall.

She was safe, and she was free. She had come into her expectations; the pre-nuptial dreams of enjoying Isom Chase’s wealth were suddenly at hand.

Together with the old rifle and Isom’s blood-stained garments, the coroner had taken away the little bag of gold, to be used as evidence, he said. He had taken the money, just as it was in the little sack, a smear of blood on it, after counting it before witnesses and giving her a receipt for the amount. Two thousand dollars; one hundred pieces of twenty dollars each. That was the tale of the contents of the canvas bag which had lain grinning on Isom’s pulseless heart. It was not a great amount of money, considering Isom’s faculty for gaining and holding it. It was the general belief that he had ten, twenty, times that amount, besides his loans, hidden away, and the secret of his hiding-place had gone out of the world with Isom.

Others said that he had put his money into lands, pointing to the many farms which he owned and rented in the county. 156 But be that as it might, there was Ollie, young and handsome, well paid for her hard year as Isom’s wife, free now, and doubtless already willing at heart to make some young man happy. Nobody blamed her for that.

It was well known that Isom had abused her, that her life had been cheerless and lonely under his roof. Those who did not know it from first-hand facts believed it on the general notoriety of the man. Contact with Isom Chase had been like sleeping on a corn-husk bed; there was no comfort in it, no matter which way one turned.

Ollie, her eyes closed languidly, now languidly opened to follow the track of the lamb-fleece clouds, her young body feeling warm and pleasant, as if lately released from a sorely cramped state; Ollie, with little fleeting dreams in her pretty, shallow head, was believed by the women of the neighborhood to be in the way of realizing on Isom’s expectations of an heir. It was a little fiction that had taken its beginning from Sol Greening’s early talk, and owing to that rumor the coroner had been gentle with her beyond the inclination of his heart.

The young widow smiled as she lay on her pillow and thought of the little intimate touches of tenderness which this baseless rumor had made her the beneficiary of at her neighbor’s hands. She was selfish enough to take advantage of their mistaken kindnesses and to surrender to their vigorous elbows the work below stairs. That was her day of freedom; it was her dawn of peace.

It was pleasant to have come through stress and hardship to this restful eddy in the storm of life; to have faced peril and disgrace and come away still clean in the eyes of men. Ollie was content with things as they were, as the evening shadows closed the door upon the events of that trying day.

Quite different was the case of Sarah Newbolt, once more back in her poor shelter, nested in bramble and clambering 157 vine. She was dazed, the song was gone out of her heart. She was bereaved, and her lips were moving in endless repetition of supplication to the Almighty for the safety and restoration of her son.

What was this grim thing of which they had accused her Joe? She could not yet get to the bottom of it, she could not understand how men could be so warped and blind. Why, Joe had told them how it happened, he had explained it as clear as well water, but they didn’t believe him. She went out and sat on the porch to think it out, if possible, and come to some way of helping Joe. There was not a friend to turn to, not a counselor to lean upon.

She never had felt it lonely in the old place before, for there was companionship even in the memory of her dead, but this evening as she sat on the porch, the familiar objects in the yard growing dim through the oncoming night, the hollowness of desolation was there. Joe was in prison. The neighbors had refused to believe the word of her boy. There was nobody to help him but her. The hand of everybody else was against him. She had delivered him into bondage and brought this trouble to him, and now she must stir herself to set him free.

“It’s all my own doin’s,” said she in unsparing reproach. “My chickens has come to roost.”

After nightfall she went into the kitchen where she sat a dreary while before her stove, leaning forward in her unlovely, ruminating pose. Through the open draft of the stove the red coals within it glowed, casting three little bars of light upon the floor. Now and then a stick burned in two and settled down, showering sparks through the grate. These little flashes lit up her brown and somber face, and discovered the slow tears upon her weathered cheeks. For a long time she sat thus, then at last she lifted her head and looked around the room. Her table stood as she had left 158 it in the morning, no food had passed her lips since then. But the frantic turmoil of the first hours after Joe had been led away to jail had quieted.

A plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. In the morning she would go to Shelbyville and seek her husband’s old friend, Colonel Henry Price, to solicit his advice and assistance. In a manner comforted by this resolution, she prepared herself a pot of coffee and some food. After the loneliest and most hopeless meal that she ever had eaten in her life, she went to bed.

In the house of Isom Chase, where neighbors sat to watch the night out beside the shrouded body, there was a waste of oil in many lamps, such an illumination that it seemed a wonder that old Isom did not rise up from his gory bed to turn down the wicks and speak reproof. Everybody must have a light. If an errand for the living or a service for the dead called one from this room to that, there must be a light. That was a place of tragic mystery, a place of violence and death. If light had been lacking there on the deeds of Isom Chase, on his hoardings and hidings away; on the hour of his death and the mystery of it, then all this must be balanced tonight by gleams in every window, beams through every crevice; lamps here, lanterns there, candles in cupboards, cellar, and nook.

Let there be light in the house of Isom Chase, and in the sharp espionage of curious eyes, for dark days hang over it, and the young widow who draws the pity of all because she cannot weep.

No matter how hard a woman’s life with a man has been, when he dies she is expected to mourn. That was the standard of fealty and respect in the neighborhood of Isom Chase, as it is in more enlightened communities in other parts of the world. A woman should weep for her man, no matter what bruises on body his heavy hand may leave behind him, or 159 what scars in the heart which no storm of tears can wash away. Custom has made hypocrites of the ladies in this matter the wide world through. Let no man, therefore, lying bloodless and repellent upon his cooling-board, gather comfort to his cold heart when his widow’s tears fall upon his face. For she may be weeping more for what might have been than was.

Isom Chase’s widow could not weep at all. That was what they said of her, and their pity was more tender, their compassion more sweet. Dry grief, they said. And that is grief like a covered fire, which smolders in the heart and chars the foundations of life. She ought to be crying, to clear her mind and purge herself of the dregs of sorrow, which would settle and corrode unless flushed out by tears; she ought to get rid of it at once, like any other widow, and settle down to the enjoyment of all the property.

The women around Ollie in her room tried to provoke her tears by reference to Isom’s good qualities, his widely known honesty, his ceaseless striving to lay up property which he knew he couldn’t take with him, which he realized that his young wife would live long years after him to enjoy. They glozed his faults and made virtues out of his close-grained traits; they praised and lamented, with sighs and mournful words, but Isom’s widow could not weep.

Ollie wished they would go away and let her sleep. She longed for them to put out the lamps and let the moonlight come in through the window and whiten on the floor, and bring her soft thoughts of Morgan. She chafed under their chatter, and despised them for their shallow pretense. There was not one of them who had respected Isom in life, but now they sat there, a solemn conclave, great-breasted sucklers of the sons of men, and insisted that she, his unloved, his driven, abused and belabored wife, weep tears for his going, for which, in her heart, she was glad. 160

It was well that they could not see her face, turned into the shadow, nestled against the pillow, moved now and then as by the zephyr breath of a smile. At times she wanted to laugh at their pretense and humbug. To prevent it breaking out in unseemly sound she was obliged to bite the coverlet and let the spasms of mirth waste themselves in her body and limbs.

When the good women beheld these contractions they looked at each other meaningly and shook dolefully wise heads. Dry grief. Already it was laying deep hold on her, racking her like ague. She would waste under the curse of it, and follow Isom to the grave in a little while, if she could not soon be moved to weep.

Ollie did not want to appear unneighborly nor unkind, but as the night wore heavily on she at last requested them to leave her.

“You are all so good and kind!” said she, sincere for the moment, for there was no mistaking that they meant to be. “But I think if you’d take the lamp out of the room I could go to sleep. If I need you, I’ll call.”

“Now, that’s just what you do, deary,” said red-faced Mrs. Greening, patting her head comfortingly.

The women retired to the spare bedroom where Joe had slept the night before, and from there their low voices came to Ollie through the open door. She got up and closed it gently, and ran up the window-blind and opened the window-sash, letting in the wind, standing there a little while drawing her gown aside, for the touch of it on her hot breast. She remembered the day that Joe had seen her so, the churn-dasher in her hand; the recollection of what was pictured in his face provoked a smile.

There was a mist before the moon like a blowing veil, presaging rain tomorrow, the day of the funeral. It was well known in that part of the country that rain on a coffin 161 a certain sign that another of that family would die within a year. Ollie hoped that it would not rain. She was not ready to die within a year, nor many years. Her desire to live was large and deep. She had won the right, Isom had compensated in part for the evil he had done her in leaving behind him all that was necessary to make the journey pleasant.

As she turned into her bed again and composed herself for sleep, she thought of Joe, with a feeling of tenderness. She recalled again what Isom had proudly told her of the lad’s blood and breeding, and she understood dimly now that there was something extraordinary in Joe’s manner of shielding her to his own disgrace and hurt. A common man would not have done that, she knew.

She wondered if Morgan would have done it, if he had been called upon, but the yea or the nay of it did not trouble her. Morgan was secure in her heart without sacrifice.

Well, tomorrow they would bury Isom, and that would end it. Joe would be set free then, she thought, the future would be clear. So reasoning, she went to sleep in peace.

Ollie’s habit of early rising during the past year of her busy life made it impossible for her to sleep after daylight. For a while after waking next morning she lay enjoying that new phase of her enfranchisement. From that day forward there would be no need of rising with the dawn. Time was her own now; she could stretch like a lady who has servants to bring and take away, until the sun came into her chamber, if she choose.

Downstairs there were dim sounds of people moving about, and the odors of breakfast were rising. Thinking that it would be well, for the sake of appearances, to go down and assist them, she got up and dressed.

She stopped before the glass to try her hair in a new arrangement, it was such bright hair, she thought, for mourning, 162 but yet as somber as her heart, bringing it a little lower on the brow, in a sweep from the point of parting. The effect was somewhat frivolous for a season of mourning, and she would have to pass through one, she sighed. After a while, when she went out into Morgan’s world of laughter and chatter and fine things. She smiled, patting her lively tresses back into their accustomed place.

Ollie was vain of her prettiness, as any woman is, only in her case there was no soul beneath it to give it ballast. Her beauty was pretty much surface comeliness, and it was all there was of her, like a great singer who sometimes is nothing but a voice.

Sol Greening was in the kitchen with his wife and his son’s wife and two of the more distant neighbor women who had remained overnight. The other men who had watched with Sol around Isom’s bier had gone off to dig a grave for the dead, after the neighborly custom there. As quick as her thought, Ollie’s eyes sought the spot where Isom’s blood had stood in the worn plank beside the table. The stain was gone. She drew her breath with freedom, seeing it so, yet wondering how they had done it, for she had heard all her life that the stain of human blood upon a floor could not be scoured away.

“We was just gettin’ a bite of breakfast together,” said Mrs. Greening, her red face shining, and brighter for its big, friendly smile.

“I was afraid you might not be able to find everything,” explained Ollie, “and so I came down.”

“No need for you to do that, bless your heart!” Mrs. Greening said. “But we was just talkin’ of callin’ you. Sol, he run across something last night that we thought you might want to see as soon as you could.”

Ollie looked from one to the other of them with a question in her eyes. 163

“Something–something of mine?” she asked.

Mrs. Greening nodded.

“Something Isom left. Fetch it to her, Sol.”

Sol disappeared into the dread parlor where Isom lay, and came back with a large envelope tied about with a blue string, and sealed at the back with wax over the knotted cord.

“It’s Isom’s will,” said Sol, giving it to Ollie. “When we was makin’ room to fetch in the coffin and lay Isom out in it last night, we had to move the center table, and the drawer fell out of it. This paper was in there along with a bundle of old tax receipts. As soon as we seen what was on it, we decided it orto be put in your hands as soon as you woke up.”

“I didn’t know he had a will,” said Ollie, turning the envelope in her hands, not knowing what to make of it, or what to do with it, at all.

“Read what’s on the in-vellup,” advised Sol, standing by importantly, his hands on his hips, his big legs spread out.

Outside the sun was shining, tenderly yellow like a new plant. Ollie marked it with a lifting of relief. There would be no rain on the coffin. It was light enough to read the writing on the envelope where she stood, but she moved over to the window, wondering on the way.

What was a will for but to leave property, and what need had Isom for making one?

It was an old envelope, its edges browned by time, and the ink upon it was gray.

That was the superscription in Isom’s writing, correctly spelled, correctly punctuated, after his precise way in all business affairs. 164

“Who is John B. Little?” asked Ollie, her heart seeming to grow small, shrinking from some undefined dread.

“He’s Judge Little, of the county court now,” said Sol. “I’ll go over after him, if you say so.”

“After breakfast will do,” said Ollie.

She put the envelope on the shelf beside the clock, as if it did not concern her greatly. Yet, under her placid surface she was deeply moved. What need had Isom for making a will?

“It saves a lot of lawin’ and wastin’ money on costs,” said Sol, as if reading her mind and making answer to her thought. “You’ll have a right smart of property on your hands to look after for a young girl like you.”

Of course, to her. Who else was there for him to will his property to? A right smart, indeed. Sol’s words were wise; they quieted her sudden, sharp pain of fear.

Judge Little lived less than a mile away. Before nine o’clock he was there, his black coat down to his knees, for he was a short man and bowed of the legs, his long ends of hair combed over his bald crown.

The judge was at that state of shrinkage when the veins can be counted in the hands of a thin man of his kind. His smoothly shaved face was purple from congestion, the bald place on his small head was red. He was a man who walked about as if wrapped in meditation, and on him rested a notarial air. His arms were almost as long as his legs, his hands were extremely large, lending the impression that they had belonged originally to another and larger man, and that Judge Little must have become possessed of them by some process of delinquency against a debtor. As he walked along his way those immense hands hovered near the skirts of his long coat, the fingers bent, as if to lay hold of that impressive garment and part it. This, together with the judge’s meditative appearance, lent him the aspect of always being on the point of sitting down. 165

“Well, well,” said he, sliding his spectacles down his nose to get the reading focus, advancing the sealed envelope, drawing it away again, “so Isom left a will? Not surprising, not surprising. Isom was a careful man, a man of business. I suppose we might as well proceed to open the document?”

The judge was sitting with his thin legs crossed. They hung as close and limp as empty trousers. Around the room he roved his eyes, red, watery, plagued by dust and wind. Greening was there, and his wife. The daughter-in-law had gone home to get ready for the funeral. The other two neighbor women reposed easily on the kitchen chairs, arms tightly folded, backs against the wall.

“You, Mrs. Chase, being the only living person who is likely to have an interest in the will as legatee, are fully aware of the circumstances under which it was found, and so forth and so forth?”

Ollie nodded. There was something in her throat, dry and impeding. She felt that she could not speak.

Judge Little took the envelope by the end, holding it up to the light. He took out his jack-knife and cut the cord.

It was a thin paper that he drew forth, and with little writing on it. Soon Judge Little had made himself master of its contents, with an Um-m-m, as he started, and with an A-h-h! when he concluded, and a sucking-in of his thin cheeks.

He looked around again, a new brightness in his eyes. But he said nothing. He merely handed the paper to Ollie.

“Read it out loud,” she requested, giving it back.

Judge Little fiddled with his glasses again. Then he adjusted the paper before his eyes like a target, and read:

That was all.