"Well," he said, "I'd stake something that that's a part of the old hollow oak. Shall we go and see?"
But Mary told him that the farm was out of bounds. And he thought a moment, and then swung his legs over the wall.
"I won't be two minutes," he said. "I'd like to see if I'm right—it's fifteen years ago—" And he strode off across the forbidden farm to the woods. When he came back he said that he had been right, and that nothing had changed much. He tossed me a flint arrowhead that he had picked up—he was always finding things, and we went on again.
When we got to the middle of Pelham Bridge we all stopped and leaned against the railing and looked down into the swift, swirling current. Braddish tore an old envelop into little pieces and dropped them overboard by pairs, so that we might see which would beat the other to a certain point.
But the shadows began to grow long now and presently Braddish had to leave us to attend a meeting in Westchester, and I remember how he turned and waved, just before the Boulevard dips to the causeway, and how Mary recollected something that she had meant to say and ran after him a little way calling, and he did not hear. And she came back laughing, and red in the face, and breathing quick.
Two days later my father, who had started for the early train, came driving back to the house as if he had missed it. But he said, no, and his face was very grave—he had heard a piece of news that greatly concerned Mary, and he had come back to tell her. He went into the study with my mother, and presently they sent for Mary and she went in to them.
A few minutes later, through the closed door, Ellen and I heard a sudden, wailing cry.
Poor Braddish, it seems, in one of his ungovernable tempers had shot a man to death, and fled away no one knew whither.
II
The man killed was named Hagan. He was a red-faced, hard-drinking brute, not without sharp wits and a following—or better, a heeling. There had been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried a circumstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as the law lay things looked bad for Braddish.