"I understand you, God bless you," he said. "Don't say a word; I understand you. Git on the mare and go to town and find out all you can. I won't go jest now—can't stand to see my son in jail. But don't say a word, for I understand you. I reckon the neighborhood is pretty well alive over it by this time. See if they'll let him go about on bail, but I don't reckon they will, even if he did give himself up. They'll think that he done it because he must have knowed that they were bound to catch him. Go on and do whatever your jedgment tells you, and I know it will be all right."
Over the road I went, toward Purdy, and the people who had come out of their houses to speak words of encouragement to Alf and me when we were on our way to see the Aimes boys tried, now stood about their doors, gazing stupidly. At the wagon-maker's shop a crowd was gathered, and I was recognized as I drew near by young men who had met me at the General's house the night before—now so long ago, it seemed—and they came out into the road and urged me to tell them all I knew. I felt that Etheredge had already stirred in his own coloring, but I told the story of the tragedy just as I had told it to the old man; and I had gathered rein to resume my journey when a man rode up. "I'm going back to town!" he shouted, waving his hand to a man who stood in the door of the wagon-maker's shop. I rode on and he came up beside me.
"Are you Mr. Hawes?" he asked, and when I had answered him he said: "I am Dr. Etheredge."
I bowed and he nodded with distinct coolness. He was not of happy appearance; he was lean and angular, gray beyond the demand of his years, and it struck me that he must be given to drink, not because he was gray, but because there were puffs under his eyes and broken veins where his skin was stretched over his high cheek-bones.
"A devil of an affair, this," he said. "Man met in the public highway and murdered."
"Don't put it that way," I spoke up, "for perhaps you are not yet acquainted with the causes that led to it."
"No cause, sir, should lead to murder."
"I agree with you there, but many a man has been compelled to kill in order to save his own life."
He sneered at me. "But has many a man been compelled to stand for hours in a public road, and in order to save his own life shoot down an innocent person? I always held that Alf Jucklin was a dangerous and a desperate man, and everybody knows that he comes of that breed. I never did like him; and he took a dislike to me without cause. Stood near a church in a crowd of men one day when I seemed to be under discussion and declared that a man to be a doctor ought to be smart and to be smart a man must say something to prove the thought within him; and then he asked if any one had ever heard me say anything worth remembering."
I felt that he wanted to quarrel with me, and I was in the humor to gratify him. "And did anyone ever hear you say a thing worth remembering?" I asked.