“I’m goin’ to do all I can to clear you,” he said, earnestly, “and I got the mayor behind me. He said he’d use every resource of his office to get this murderer. I believe in you—and don’t you forget it!”
She had not been able to speak, but the look in her eyes had thanked him.
Two days later, Kate was disinfecting the wound of a sheep that an untrained dog had injured when a note from the Security State Bank was handed her by one of Neifkins’ herders. It was signed by its President, Mr. Vernon Wentz, late of the White Hand Laundry, and there was something which filled her with forebodings in the curt request for an immediate interview.
It was too late to start for Prouty that day, but she would leave early in the morning, so she went on applying a solution of permanganate of potassium to the wound and sprinkling it with a healing powder while she conjectured as to what Wentz might want of her.
In her usual work Kate found an outlet for the nervous tension under which she was still laboring. It helped a little, though it seemed impossible to believe that she ever again would be serene of mind and able to think clearly. Her thoughts were a jumble; as yet she could only feel and suffer terribly. Remorse took precedence over all other emotions, over the sense of loneliness and loss, over the appalling accusation. Her writhing conscience was never quiet. She would gladly have exchanged every hope of the future she dared harbor for five minutes of the dead man’s life in which to beg forgiveness.
In the short interval since the coroner’s inquest public opinion had crystallized in Prouty, and Kate’s guilt was now a certainty in the minds of its citizens.
“She done it, all right, only they can’t prove it on her.” Hiram Butefish merely echoed the opinion of the community when he made the assertion, upon seeing Kate turn the corner by the Prouty House and ride down the main street the day following the delivery of Mr. Wentz’s summons.
Suffering had made Kate acutely sensitive and she was quick to feel the atmosphere of hostility. She read it in the countenances of the passersby on the sidewalk, in the cold eyes staring at her from the windows, in the bank president’s uncompromising attitude, even in the cashier’s supercilious inventory as he looked her over.
Kate had entered the wide swinging doors of the bank simultaneously with Mr. Abram Pantin, at whom Mr. Wentz had waved a long white hand and requested him languidly to be seated. Since he already had motioned Kate to the only chair beside the one he himself occupied in his enclosure, it was clear there was no way for Mr. Pantin to accept the invitation unless he sat on the floor. It chafed Pantin exceedingly to be patronized by one who so recently had done his laundry, but since his business at the bank was of an imperative nature he concealed his annoyance with the best grace possible and waited.
Temporarily, at least, Mr. Wentz had lost his equilibrium. From washing the town’s soiled linen to loaning it money was a change so sudden and radical that the rise made him dizzy; he was apt, therefore, to be a little erratic, his manner varying during a single conversation from the cold austerity of a bloodless capitalist to the free and easy democracy of the days when he had stood in the doorway of his laundry in his undershirt and “joshed” the passersby.