The difficulty was solved by supposing that the narrator had made a mistake of one day in the date of the occurrence; so that our friend did not hesitate to introduce the story at every tavern and country store along the road, expending a whole bunch of Spanish wrappers among at least twenty horrified audiences. He found himself invariably the first bearer of the intelligence, and was so pestered with questions that he could not avoid filling up the outline, till it became quite a respectable narrative. He met with one piece of corroborative evidence. Mr. Higginbotham was a trader; and a former clerk of his, to whom Dominicus related the facts, testified that the old gentleman was accustomed to return home through the orchard about nightfall with the money and valuable papers of the store in his pocket. The clerk manifested but little grief at Mr. Higginbotham’s catastrophe, hinting, what the pedler had discovered in his own dealings with him, that he was a crusty old fellow, as close as a vice. His property would descend to a pretty niece, who was now keeping school in Kimballton.
What with telling the news for the public good and driving bargains for his own, Dominicus was so much delayed on the road that he chose to put up at a tavern, about five miles short of Parker’s Falls. After supper, lighting one of his prime cigars, he seated himself in the bar-room, and went through the story of the murder, which had grown so fast that it took him half-an-hour to tell. There were as many as twenty people in the room, nineteen of whom received it all for gospel. But the twentieth was an elderly farmer, who had arrived on horseback a short time before, and was now seated in a corner smoking his pipe. When the story was concluded he rose up very deliberately, brought his chair right in front of Dominicus, and stared him full in the face, puffing out the vilest tobacco-smoke the pedler had ever smelt.
“Will you make affidavit,” demanded he in the tone of a country justice taking an examination, “that old Squire Higginbotham, of Kimballton, was murdered in his orchard the night before last, and found hanging on his great pear-tree yesterday morning?”
“I tell the story as I heard it,” answered Dominicus, dropping his half-burnt cigar. “I don’t say that I saw the thing done, so I can’t take my oath that he was murdered exactly in that way.”
“But I can take mine,” said the farmer, “that if Squire Higginbotham was murdered the night before last, I drank a bottle of bitters with his ghost this morning. Being a neighbour of mine he called me into his store as I was riding by and treated me, and then asked me to do a little business for him on the road. He didn’t seem to know any more about his own murder than I did.”
“Why, then, it can’t be a fact!” exclaimed Dominicus Pike.
“I guess he’d have mentioned if it was,” said the old farmer, and he removed his chair back to the corner, leaving Dominicus quite down in the mouth.
Here was a sad resurrection of old Mr. Higginbotham! The pedler had no heart to mingle in the conversation any more, but comforted himself with a glass of gin and water and went to bed, where, all night long, he dreamt of hanging on the St. Michael’s pear-tree. To avoid the old farmer (whom he so detested that his suspension would have pleased him better than Mr. Higginbotham’s), Dominicus rose in the grey of the morning, put the little mare into the green cart, and trotted swiftly away towards Parker’s Falls. The fresh breeze, the dewy road, and the pleasant summer dawn revived his spirits, and might have encouraged him to repeat the old story had there been anybody awake to hear it. But he met neither ox-team, light waggon, chaise, horseman, nor foot-traveller, till just as he crossed Salmon River a man came trudging down to the bridge with a bundle over his shoulder on the end of a stick.
“Good morning, mister,” said the pedler, reining in his mare; “if you come from Kimballton or that neighbourhood maybe you can tell me the real facts about the affair of old Mr. Higginbotham. Was the old fellow actually murdered two or three nights ago by an Irishman and a nigger?”
Dominicus had spoken in too great a hurry to observe at first that the stranger himself had a deep tinge of negro blood. On hearing this sudden question the Ethiopian appeared to change his skin, its yellow hue becoming a ghastly white, while shaking and stammering he thus replied—