She reached home in time for dinner, was received with no enthusiasm, for her mother and grandparents were true mountaineers, and their swarthy faces masked their feelings, yet she was made to feel perfectly welcome.
Nobody had died, no one was sick, the house hadn’t burned down, evidently the trials foretold by Jake Mintges were yet to come.
That afternoon she showed the broken violin to her grandfather, who took it to his workbench in an out-house to repair it, undaunted by the seeming endlessness of the reconstruction.
Eugenie seemed perfectly contented to be at home, She had had enough of the bizarre, and reveled again in the humdrum. Five or six days after her return the weekly county paper appeared at the house, with its boiler plate front page and patent insides. Some instinct made[made] her open the wrapper as it lay on the kitchen table. On the front page she saw the likeness of a familiar face, the well-known full eyes, oval cheeks, rounded chin and drooping mustache, Derment Catesby. Then the headlines caught her eyes, “Handsome Actor Shot to Death by Insanely Jealous Husband at Stage Door.” Then she glanced at the date and the hour. It was the night that she had taken the train–the very moment, perhaps, that Jacob Mintges’ grinning face had looked through the curtains of her berth. Yes, the murderer had waited a long time, as the victim had tarried in the green-room.
Eugenie sucked her full lips a moment, then looked hard at the picture and the whole article again. Then she turned to her mother and grandparents, who were seated about the stove.
“Say, folks,” she said, coldly,[coldly,] “there’s the fine gent I went away with from Swinesfordstown. I got out in time, the very night he was murdered.”
The mother and the old people half rose in their chairs to look at the wood cut.
“How did you know he was playing you false?” said the old grandfather.
“How did I know, gran’pap?” she replied. “Why, the night before, Jake Mintges came to me, and I knew something was due to go wrong, and home was the place for little me. You see I missed it all by a stone’s throw.”
"You’re right, ‘Genie’," said the old mountaineer. “Mintges never comes to us unless he means business.”