She looked at him strangely—studied his face steadily.
"I'll be going out now, I think—I'm going to run over to see Julia for a time. Please don't go out on the street, Don. Stay right here. We got into trouble enough yesterday."
"You needn't fear," said he. "There's nothing and nobody in this town I want to see. I'll be glad when I shake the dust of it off my feet—when I once get squared away in my own business you shall leave this place and live with me."
And then, as there came to him again and again the anticipated pain of parting with the one he himself loved, he came up to his mother and put his arms once more upon her shoulders. Again her hands found his hair. She cast a quick glance about her, as though in his defense.
"Don," said she, "I think I'll never get over thinking of you as just a boy, a little boy."
He tried to smile. "Pity you didn't drown me in the pool yonder," said he.
It was the most cruel thing he could have found to say, although he spoke only in his own bitterness, careless, as a man so often is, of a woman's hurts. But she left him without comment; and soon he had resumed his own restless walking up and down in the narrow quarters which seemed to him such a prison.
Meantime all Spring Valley was afoot and agog over this news. It was the most sensational thing that had happened, as Aaron Craybill said, since Ben Wilson's wife went crazy out on the farm, come four years ago, and killed her four babies, and hid in the haystack until they found her three days later, and sent her to the asylum. And so forth, and so forth.
All the good folk met in groups at home or in the streets, so that within an hour after breakfast there was not a soul in all Spring Valley did not know that the town marshal had just been killed by some unknown person for some unknown reason. The news seemed dulling, stupefying. The clerks who opened the drug stores around the public square, the only shops open of the Sunday, were slow in their sweeping out that morning. Pedestrians on the streets walked slowly. The entire life of the town seemed slow. The sluggish, arresting solemnity of death sat upon all the little community.
Spring Valley had no daily newspaper, and even the weekly Clarion, a production of some six pages, had its trials in making a living there, so close was the village to larger towns which reached out and covered most of its commercial needs in this time of telegraph and trolley. The editor of the Clarion was, naturally, the correspondent of the largest daily of the near-by metropolis. Twice in all his life he had had opportunity for a first page story in the great city daily. His first metropolitan opportunity was when the aforementioned farmer's wife had killed her children, some four years ago. And now here was something quite as big. Editor Anderson sat at his own breakfast table for more than half an hour pondering on the opening sentence which he was going to write in his dispatch to the morning daily.