"Here he was my husband, and the world may never be the wiser," said she, taking the other to her grateful heart. "Down there he is yours, and no one there must know how he has served you. You can save me, Justine, and I can shield him from the curses of your people. He will lie in the grave you dig for him away down there, and your friends may always look upon his headstone and say: 'He was a good man. We all loved him.' It is fair, Justine, and I will love you to my dying day for doing all this for me."
"I love you," said Justine, and they went forth to play their unhappy parts.
It was Celeste, keen and bold in her desperation, who wrote the letter to 'Gene Crawley, signing a fictitious name, Justine looking over her shoulder with streaming eyes. It briefly told of a sudden death and ended with the statement that a telegram would follow announcing the time of leaving Chicago with the body. The newspapers in the city told the story of the suicide, giving the cause as ill-health, and pictured the grief of the young widow. Celeste saw the reporters herself. Purposely, deliberately she misinformed them in many of the details regarding his birthplace and his earlier life. This act of shrewdness on her part was calculated to mislead the people of Clay township, and it succeeded. No one could connect the identity of the suicide with that of the youth who had gone out from that Indiana community long ago.
How the two women lived through the funeral service in S—— Place was past all understanding.
The real wife heard the sobs of the other and choked with the grief she was compelled to suppress. The other wept, but who knows whether the tears were tribute of love for the man over whom the clergyman said such gentle, hopeful words? A dead man and two women knew the story that would have shocked the world. One could not speak, the others would not. And so he was eulogized.
That night the two women and their dead left Chicago for Glenville. Their only companion was Dudley Sherrod, the second.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CRAWLEY'S LEGACY.
The people of Clay Township were kept in the dark concerning the manner in which Jud came to his death. The letter to 'Gene merely announced that his sudden death was due to a hemorrhage, and another letter to Parson Marks from Justine's friend in the city bore the same news. Naturally Jud's friends believed that the hemorrhage was of the lungs, which inspired ninety per cent. of them to say that they had always regarded him as frail. Some went so far as to recall predictions made when he was a boy to the effect that he "wouldn't live to see thirty year."