“He got the irons off somehow,” Uncle John Brand said, exasperated; “I don’t know how. He didn’t stop to explain!” He found a relief in this fine sarcasm, and then said: “Aren’t you going to do anything?” “Well,” said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in him, “I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don’t know just what to do.” He sat up, and looked about all over the room. “You don’t see the marshal, do you?” Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust. “Just look outside there, will you, John,” my grandfather went on, “and see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I’ll speak to him and have him go after the prisoner.” Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed; laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from the heat of that day. II Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential reality of life, and have tried to make it so. I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it. “It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she could not remember.