The vicissitudes of the trial had been the veriest trifles to her. She had utilized the metropolitan sojourn. She had pervaded the stores, as women of her sort do elsewhere. Mighty little there was in these stores that Aunt Dely had not rummaged.
“Ye tole me that afore,” said the absorbed Alethea.
Mrs. Purvine chuckled aloud as she reviewed the fact. It afforded her an occult complacence, yet she laughed at it.
Presently she recurred to it.
“My cracky! Lethe,” she exclaimed, “who makes ’em?”
And with this problem in her mind, she fell asleep among the comforts of “town folkses’ geese.”
XV.
The fires of discontent smouldered throughout the next day. Although many of the country people had left town, there was more than the usual stir upon the streets. Idle knots of men strolling about or standing on the corners neglected their avocations in eager discussion of the events of the previous evening. There was very general reprehension of the action of the mob,—so general that it might suggest a wonder as to whence came its component elements, and an unpleasant feeling that perhaps a satirical ringleader might be advancing these rebukes, and watching with secret laughter their effect. Many rumors prevailed, some so fantastic as to balk the credulity that sought to accept them, and others probable enough to be a solution of Mink’s disappearance. Some maintained that he had been liberated by the mob. Others said that at the time of the onslaught he had been hidden in the cellar with the jailer and the jailer’s family; and this was again roundly denied, for the cellars were reported to have been thoroughly searched. It was said, too, that the prisoner had been gagged, bound securely, and boldly carried forth from the back door through the crowd in the intense darkness, and that he was now held in retreat at the sheriff’s house. However it might have been, that officer received about noonday two or three threatening letters signed, “The men that elected you.”
He had since been disposed to exonerate himself, and he bore a troubled, anxious face about the town, and talked in a loud, strained, remonstrant falsetto. It was through some words which he let fall, in the perturbation of the discovery that he was liable to be held to account personally by this unknown and numerous enemy, that it became public he had applied to Judge Gwinnan, not in his judicial capacity, but for advice in this emergency, and that it was Gwinnan who had devised the ruse which had baffled the rescuers.