The young doctor, while waiting to settle his bill, soliloquized:
“Poor fellow! he was lying to me right along, but I wonder why. I’d wager a hundred dollars he was born in West Virginia and hasn’t been out of the rural districts a year. It must be that he feared recognition. An outlaw, perhaps, from justice, skulking in the shadows, fearing the sound of his own name. I felt sure he scarcely deserved my charity, but I could not help being liberal with him, more than if he had been an entire stranger; for he is not a stranger, I am sure. He is identified somehow with my past; and something tells me we shall meet again.”
Doctor Ludington was right in his suspicions.
The poor wretch he had befriended was indeed a West Virginian, exiled from home by the wrath of his neighbors and the threats of a resident physician whom he had made out a liar.
Old Doctor Binks was terrible in his cups, and he had sworn to have the life of the chore boy of Gran’ther Groves, who had brought him the message the night of the Hallowe’en tragedy and then flatly denied it, putting the old physician into no end of a difficulty.
Although people had pretended to disbelieve the old man’s statement at first, time had justified him, for the flight of Dan Ellis had in it elements of such grave suspicion that by and by the neighbors began to say to each other:
“The old man sticks so close to his story, it may be true. I never knew him to make a mistake in prescribing even when he was drunk.”
Little by little, after the first excitement, the neighbors began to regain confidence in Doctor Binks’ truth and Eva Somerville’s purity.
“There must have been some mistake behind the racket, and Dan Ellis was at the bottom of it all. He told that story to Doctor Binks just for a lark, and when he saw what awful trouble it caused he was afraid to confess his share in it; he just lied out of it,” the postmaster said to the merchant, who replied:
“I always set so much store by little Eva, I never could a-bear to think as she done wrong and disgraced the family. And that there Ludington, too; he was a right smart, likely feller, and I never heerd a word hinted agin’ his character. By gum! I b’lieve they was both innercent as babes unborn, little Eva and the doctor, and if Terry Groves hadn’t a-been so all-fired jealous of his pretty cousin he might have stopped to find out the truth before he began to shout so peart. If Dan Ellis ever sneaks back into this neighborhood I’m in favor of giving him some White-cap medicine!”