“What's up?” he asked sharply.
Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blow that had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained the tragic happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent had remembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on the farm of which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sunday afternoons the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and the two people had gone to walk in the very place where he had just been found. “I had a hunch he would be out here,” he boasted. “I figured it out. Crowds started out of town in all directions, but I cut out alone. Then I happened to see this fellow and just for company I brought him along.” He put up his hand and, looking at Tom, tapped his forehead. “Cracked,” he declared, “he always was. A fellow I knew saw him once in that woods,” he said pointing. “Somebody had shot a squirrel and he took on about it as though he had lost a child. I said then he was crazy, and he has sure proved I was right.”
At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh's knees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her father had told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth she had wanted passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing was done. In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women in the world who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and it had been done. As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth's shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place. At the thought of the same place, now become the scene of a desperate killing, her body shook so that she clutched at Hugh's arms, striving to steady herself.
Ed Hall took the senseless figure of the old man in the road into his arms and half threw it into the back seat of the car. To Clara it was as though his rough, misunderstanding hands were on her own body. The car started swiftly along the road and Ed told again the story of the night's happenings. “I tell you, Mr. Hunter is in mighty bad shape, he may die,” he said. Clara turned to look at her husband and thought him totally unaffected by what had happened. His face was quiet like her father's face. The factory superintendent's voice went on explaining his part in the adventures of the evening. Ignoring the pale workman who sat lost in the shadows in a corner of the rear seat, he spoke as though he had undertaken and accomplished the capture of the murderer single-handed. As he afterwards explained to his wife, Ed felt he had been a fool not to come alone. “I knew I could handle him all right,” he explained. “I wasn't afraid, but I had figured it all out he was crazy. That made me feel shaky. When they were getting up a crowd to go out on the hunt, I says to myself, I'll go alone. I says to myself, I'll bet he's gone out to that woods on the Riggly farm where he and his wife used to go on Sundays. I started and then I saw this other man standing on a corner and I made him come with me. He didn't want to come and I wish I'd gone alone. I could have handled him and I'd got all the credit.”
In the car Ed told the story of the night in the streets of Bidwell. Some one had seen Steve Hunter shot down in the street and had declared the harness maker had done it and had then run away. A crowd had gone to the harness shop and had found the body of Jim Gibson. On the floor of the shop were the factory-made harnesses cut into bits. “He must have been in there and at work for an hour or two, stayed right in there with the man he had killed. It's the craziest thing any man ever done.”
The harness maker, lying on the floor of the car where Ed had thrown him, stirred and sat up. Clara turned to look at him and shivered. His shirt was torn so that the thin, old neck and shoulders could be plainly seen in the uncertain light, and his face was covered with blood that had dried and was now black with dust. Ed Hall went on with the tale of his triumph. “I found him where I said to myself I would. Yes, sir, I found him where I said to myself I would.”
The car came to the first of the houses of the town, long rows of cheaply built frame houses standing in what had once been Ezra French's cabbage patch, where Hugh had crawled on the ground in the moonlight, working out the mechanical problems that confronted him in the building of his plant-setting machine. Suddenly the distraught and frightened man crouched on the floor of the car, raised himself on his hands and lurched forward, trying to spring over the side. Ed Hall caught him by the arm and jerked him back. He drew back his arm to strike again but Clara's voice, cold and intense with passion, stopped him. “If you touch him, I'll kill you,” she said. “No matter what he does, don't you dare strike him again.”
Tom drove the car slowly through the streets of Bidwell to the door of a police station. Word of the return of the murderer had run ahead, and a crowd had gathered. Although it was past two o'clock the lights still burned in stores and saloons, and crowds stood at every corner. With the aid of a policeman, Ed Hall, with one eye fixed cautiously on the front seat where Clara sat, started to lead Joe Wainsworth away. “Come on now, we won't hurt you,” he said reassuringly, and had got his man free of the car when he broke away. Springing back into the rear seat the crazed man turned to look at the crowd. A sob broke from his lips. For a moment he stood trembling with fright, and then turning, he for the first time saw Hugh, the man in whose footsteps he had once crept in the darkness in Turner's Pike, the man who had invented the machine by which the earnings of a lifetime had been swept away. “It wasn't me. You did it. You killed Jim Gibson,” he screamed, and springing forward sank his fingers and teeth into Hugh's neck.