“Then after I quit prayin’ I got up slow, thinkin’ that it might have done some good, and that mebbe she’d be all right, so I started in, just as I had before, with her feet to see if they’d moved. I s’pose the reason I done this way was that if I saw her head first and knew she was dead ‘twould be all off the first thing; and when I commenced with her feet I always had some hope till I got clear up to her head. Well, her feet hadn’t moved a bit. Then I went to her hands, and they was just in the same place, and I began to feel it wa’n’t any use to look at her head; but I did. And there it was just as white as that plaster-Paris lady, and her eyes lookin’ straight up. “Then I felt sure ‘twas all off. I’d done everything I could think of, and I’d prayed just as hard as I knew how, and I was sure no one ever meant it more’n I did or wanted it any more, and I knew, of course, God had seen the whole thing and could do it if he wanted to and that he didn’t want to, and that she was clear dead. I kind of half set and half laid down on the floor a little while longer, tryin’ to think about it and what I was goin’ to do. But I couldn’t make any plans; I kep’ thinkin’ about how it had all happened, and it begun to seem as if it wa’n’t really me that hit her with the poker, but as if both of us was somebody else and I was sort of dreamin’ about it all. Ain’t you ever had them kind of feelin’s when somethin’ awful has happened? But, of course, nothin’ like that ever happened to you. I thought most about that beefsteak, and how I stopped and bought it, and didn’t go in and get a drink, and all the time it seemed to me just as if that was where I made my big mistake. And then I thought how awful near I come to goin’ into the saloon instead of the butcher-shop, and then some of the time I’d kind of feel as if mebbe I was goin’ into the saloon after all, and it wa’n’t goin’ to happen. Don’t you know how it is when anybody’s died or anything happened? You think about everything that’s done, so as to see if mebbe you can’t make it come out some other way after all? Well, that’s the way I done about every little thing, and every word we both spoke till I hit her with the poker. Another thing where I almost missed killin’ her was that poker; that coal pail didn’t belong in the settin’ room at all, but ought to have been in the kitchen, and I don’t know how it ever got in there. Mebbe the boy lugged it in for a drum. You know he didn’t have many playthings, or mebbe she started a little fire in the settin’ room, for ‘twas the first cold day. I don’t see how it could have been that either, for she was washin’ that day and wouldn’t have any time to set in there. But I don’t know as it makes any difference; the coal pail was in the settin’ room and the poker was in the pail, and they was right before my eyes at the time. If they hadn’t been I never would’ve used the poker. When she stood up and told me to kill her, I’d