“Maybe it ain’t a fairy tale,” Amos Wickliff suggested one day, two days after the mystery. He was giving “the boys” a kind word on the court-house steps.
“It’s to be hoped it is a true story,” said the youngest and naturally most hardened reporter, “since then he’ll die with a better conscience!”
“They never can convict him on the evidence,” interrupted another man. “I don’t see how they can even hold him.”
“That’s why folks are mad,” said the youngest reporter, with a pitying smile.
“There’s something in the talk, then?” said Amos, shifting his cigar to the other side of his mouth.
“Are they going to lynch that feller?” asked another reporter.
“Say so,” the first young man remarked, placidly; “a lot of the old lady’s chums are howling about stringing him up. They’ve the notion that she was burned alive, and they’re hot over it.”
“That’s your paper, old man; you had ’most two columns, and made it out Mrs. Kerby heard squealing after the boy did; and pictured the horrible situation of the poor old helpless woman writhing in anguish, and the fire eating nearer and nearer. Great Scott! it made me crawl to read it; and I saw a crowd down-town in the park, and if one fellow wasn’t reading your blasted blood-curdler out loud; and one woman was crying and telling about the old party lending her money to buy her husband’s coffin, and then letting her off paying. That made the crowd rabid. At every sentence they let off a howl. You needn’t be grinning like a wild-cat; it ain’t funny to that feller in jail, I bet. Is it, Amos?”
“You boys better call off your dogs, if you can get ’em,” was all the sheriff deigned to answer, and he rose as he spoke. He did not look disturbed, but his placid mask belied him. Better than most men he knew what stormy petrels “the newspaper boys” were. And better than any man he knew what an eggshell was his jail. “I’d almost like to have ’em bust that fool door, though,” he grimly reflected, “just to show the supervisors I knew what I was talking about. I’ll get a new jail out of those old roosters, or they’ll have to get a new sheriff. But meanwhile—” He fell into a perplexed and gloomy reverie, through which his five years’ acquaintance with the lost woman drifted pensively, as a moving car will pass, slowly revealing first one familiar face and then another. “I suppose I’m what the lawyers would call her next friend—hereabouts, anyhow,” he mused, “and yet you might say it was quite by accident we started in to know each other, poor old lady!” The cause of the first acquaintance was as simple as a starved cat which a jury of small boys were preparing to hang just under the bluff. Amos cut down the cat, and almost in the same rhythm, as the disciples of Delsarte would say, cuffed the nearest executioner, while the others fled. Amos hated cats, but this one, as if recognizing his good-will (and perhaps finding some sweet drop in the bitter existence of peril and starvation that he knew, and therefore loath to yield it), clung to Amos’s knees and essayed a feeble purr of gratitude. “Well, pussy,” said Amos, “good-bye!” But the cat did not stir, except to rub feebly again. It was a black cat, very large, ghastly thin, with the rough coat of neglect, and a pair of burning eyes that might have reminded Amos of Poe’s ghastly conceit were he not protected against such fancies by the best of protectors. He could not remember disagreeably that which he had never read. “Pussy, you’re about starved,” said Amos. “I believe I’ve got to give you a stomachful before I turn you loose.”
“I’ll give the kitty something to eat,” said a voice in the air.