“I asked him if anything had ever been found out concerning the parties who had stopped the mail coach that dark November night.
“He said that the robbery was believed to have been committed by the pit men, who were on a strike, and known to be a most lawless set, fit for any sort of violence; but though several of them had been arrested on suspicion, nothing could be proved, and they had to be released. And as for young Joe, he was game to the last.
“Young Joe! The name went through my heart like a sword! I trembled when I asked Stone if he meant Joe Wyvil, and what he had to do with the affair.
“And then he told me all the terrible truth! that young Wyvil had been the only one of all the gang who had stopped the mail coach to be arrested. That the roughs had escaped into the woods, but that he had been taken ‘red-handed’ on the spot where the lawyer fell.
“I inquired what explanation the unhappy boy had given of his presence there.
“The man told me that he had given no satisfactory account of himself whatever—that he had most earnestly asserted his innocence, and his appearance on the scene of the murder as a mere accident, owing to his having met a party bent on a ‘spree,’ and joined them. He was game to the very last.
“With a great sinking of the heart, I next inquired of Stone what had been the fate of young Wyvil, and I dreaded to hear his answer as if it had been a sentence of death. And, indeed, in one respect it was a sentence of death.
“He told me that the youth had been tried for murder, but not under the name of Wyvil. The name he had given was that of John Weston, and as there was nobody to contradict him, he being but a stranger to most people in the neighborhood, as John Weston he was convicted and condemned to death. But on account of his being a mere boy, with nothing against him before that, and on some other account, his sentence was commuted to transportation and penal servitude for life, and that he had been shot dead while trying to make his escape, or so it was reported.
“So of the crime in which five men had been implicated no one had been suspected, and no one punished but the innocent boy who knew nothing about it.
“Finally I asked Stone what had become of ‘Lil,’ the poor boy’s wife.