"Oh, it don't matter," said 'Gene, carelessly. "I just asked."
The subject was dropped at once. The crowd watched him leave the place and conversation was stagnant until Hardesty, who was near the window, remarked that 'Gene was walking pretty rapidly down the road. With the knowledge that he was out of sight and hearing, the loungers discussed him and his affairs freely.
It was not until the fourth day that he received a letter from Chicago, directed in strange handwriting. A number of men were in the store when the epistle was handed out to him by Mrs. Hardesty. Without hesitation he tore open the envelope and began to read. The letter was for him, beyond a doubt, but Justine had not addressed the envelope. What had happened to her?
He read the letter with at least a dozen eyes watching him closely, but his dark face betrayed no sign of emotion. At the end he calmly replaced the note in the envelope and strolled off homeward. Once out of the hearing of the curious, he leaned against a fence, read it again, folded it carefully, opened it and read it again, and then lowered his hands and gazed out over the fields.
CHAPTER XXVI.
TWO WOMEN AND A BABE.
"Mr. Sherrod is not working for the paper now," responded a man in the counting room when Justine, overawed, applied for information at the office of the newspaper in which her husband's pictures had attracted such widespread notice. At the station a policeman had put her in a cab with directions to the driver. With her baby and her pitiful old satchel, she was jolted over the streets and up to the door of the newspaper office. She felt small, helpless, lost in this vast solitude of noises. The rush of vehicles, cars and people frightened her. Every moment she expected there would be a collision and catastrophe. And Jud was somewhere in this seething, heartless city, sick, unhappy, discouraged and longing for her.
"I know," she responded, thickly, to the clerk, whose glance had been cold and whose tones were curt. "He left here some months ago, but he gets his mail here."
"Does he?" brusquely.