“Why, she told me, son—the Widder Norfleet told me so last night. You see she come runnin' over the back way from her house to my place—I glean somethin' had happened which made her think the time had arrived to put herself in touch with sech of the authorities ez she felt she could trust—and she detailed the whole circumstances to me. 'Twas me suggested to her that she'd better write you that there letter. In fact, you mout say I sort of dictated its gin'ral tenor. I told her that you ez the prosecutor was the one that'd be most interested in hearin' any formal statement she mout care to make, and so——”
Mr. Flournoy slumped down into a handy chair and ran some fingers through his hair.
“Then part of the joke is on me too,” he owned.
“I wouldn't go so fur ez to say that,” spake Judge Priest soothingly. “Frum where I'm settin' it looks to me like the joke is mainly on quite a number of people.”
“And the shotgun wasn't loaded?” Seemingly Mr. Flournoy found it hard to credit his own ears.
“It didn't have nary charge in ary barrel,” reaffirmed the old man. “That little woman had the spunk to go up there all alone by herse'f and bluff a whole roomful of grown men, but she didn't dare to load up her old fusee—said she didn't know how, in the first place, and, in the second place, she was skeered it mout go off and hurt somebody. Jerome, ain't that fur all the world jest like a woman?”
IX. A BEAUTIFUL EVENING *
* Publisher's Note—Under a different title this story was
printed originally in another volume of Mr. Cobb's. It is
included here in order to complete the chronicles of Judge
Priest and his people as begun in the book called “Back
Home” and continued in this book.