What a fearful word it was that I had spoken! What a panic it made in the little dooryard! The man gasped and jerked the reins and shouted to his horses and began swearing. The woman uttered a little scream and the children ran crying to her side. Now for the first time I felt the dread significance of word and deed. I had had no time to think of it before. I thought of the robber fleeing, terror-stricken, in the growing darkness.
The physical facts which are further related to this tragedy are of little moment to me now. The stranger was dead and we took his body to our home and my uncle set out for the constable. Over and over again that night I told the story of the shooting. We went to the scene of the tragedy with lanterns and fenced it off and put some men on guard there.
How the event itself and all that hurrying about in the dark had shocked and excited me! The whole theater of life had changed. Its audience had suddenly enlarged and was rushing over the stage and a kind of terror was in every face and voice. There was a red-handed villain behind the scenes, now, and how many others, I wondered. Men were no longer as they had been. Even the God to whom I prayed was different. As I write the sounds and shadows of that night are in my soul again. I see its gathering gloom. I hear its rifle shot which started all the galloping hoofs and swinging lanterns and flitting shadows and hysterical profanity. In the morning they found the robber's footprints in the damp dirt of the road and measured them. The whole countryside was afire with excitement and searching the woods and fields for the highwayman.
"Mr. Purvis," who had lost confidence suddenly in the whole world, had been found, soon after daylight next morning, under a haycock in the field of a farmer who was getting in his hay. Our hired man rose up and reported in fearful tones. A band of robbers—not one, or two, even, but a band of them—had chased him up the road and one of their bullets had torn the side of his trousers, in support of which assertion he showed the tear. With his able assistance we see at a glance both the quality and the state of mind prevailing among the humbler citizens of the countryside. They were, in a way, children whose cows had never recovered from the habit of jumping over the moon and who still worshiped at the secret shrine of Jack the Giant Killer.
The stranger was buried. There was nothing upon him to indicate his name or residence. Weeks passed with no news of the man who had slain him. I had told of the gun with a piece of wood broken out of its stock, but no one knew of any such weapon in or near Lickitysplit.
One day Uncle Peabody and I drove up to Grimshaw's to make a payment of money. I remember it was gold and silver which we carried in a little sack. I asked where Amos was and Mrs. Grimshaw—a timid, tired-looking, bony little woman who was never seen outside of her own house—said that he was working out on the farm of a Mr. Beekman near Plattsburg. He had gone over on the stage late in June to hire out for the haying. I observed that my uncle looked very thoughtful as we rode back home and had little to say.
"You never had any idee who that robber was, did ye?" he asked by and by.
"No—I could not see plain—it was so dusk," I said.
"I think Purvis lied about the gang that chased him," he said. "Mebbe he thought they was after him. In my opinion he was so scairt he couldn't 'a' told a hennock from a handsaw anyway. I think it was just one man that did that job."
How well I remember the long silence that followed and the distant voices that flashed across it now and then—the call of the mire drum in the marshes and the songs of the winter wren and the swamp robin. It was a solemn silence.