As Oliver Kuhns, the elder, went out the gate, Jacob Fackenthal came in. He would not sit down.
"Your pop saved me from jail, David," said he. "Anything I can do for you, I will. Nobody in Millerstown believes that he meant to take the communion set. If you will stay in Millerstown, Millerstown will show you what it thinks."
After a long time David went into the great house, through the front door, up the broad stairway to the handsome room which he had selected for his own. He could not understand his mother and father; still, in a measure, they put him away from them. Dimly he comprehended their tragedy, error on one side, refusal to forgive on the other, and heartbreak for both. He thought long of his father and mother. But when he went to sleep, he was thinking of William Koehler and his son Alvin and planning the fitting-out of a little store and the planting of a garden and the purchasing of a flock of chickens and several hives of bees. Old ghosts were laid, old unhappinesses forgotten; from David's consciousness there had vanished even Katy Gaumer, who in a strange way had brought him a blessing.
CHAPTER XXII
KATY IS TO BE EDUCATED AT LAST
Two months passed before Millerstown settled down, from the excited speculation which followed Katy Gaumer's flash of memory and its remarkable effects, into its usual level of excitement. Millerstown was usually excited over something. By the end of two months Sarah Ann and Bevy and Susannah Kuhns had ceased to gather on one another's porches or in one another's houses to discuss the strange Hartmans. By the end of three months all possible explanations had been offered, all possible questions answered, or proved unanswerable. Had Cassie known of the hiding-place of the silver service? Had Cassie died of a broken heart? Did persons ever die of broken hearts? Why, and again why, why, why, did John Hartman push the silver service into the hole? And why, having pushed it in, did John Hartman not take it out? Why had not Katy remembered the strange incident long before this?
"My belief is it was to be so," said Susannah Kuhns, a vague conclusion which Millerstown applied to all inexplicable affairs.
In all their speculations, no one ever thought of John Hartman or alluded to John Hartman as a thief. For once, Millerstown accepted the incomprehensible. Of the sad causes of John Hartman's behavior Millerstown knew nothing, could never know anything.
Sarah Ann, being more tender-hearted than the rest, and seeing a little more deeply into the lives of her fellow men and women, thought longest about the Hartmans. Sarah Ann's husband had been a disagreeable and parsimonious man and Sarah Ann knew something of the misery of a divided hearthstone. She often laid down the Millerstown "Star," fascinating as it was with its new stories, of a man driven by house cleaning to suicide in a deep well, of a dog which spoke seven words, or of a snake creeping up a church aisle, and took off her spectacles and thought of the Hartmans and of the Koehlers and of Katy Gaumer's strange part in their affairs.