“You are out electioneering, I know,” the proprietor smiled, agreeably, as he rubbed his fat hands together. “Well, you are going to run like a scared dog. I hear your name everywhere. It looked as black as Egyptian darkness for you once, but you are gaining ground. No man ever had a better campaign document than the speech Jabe Parsons' wife made. Gee whiz! it was a stem-winder; it set folks to laughin' at Wiggin, and that was the worst thing that ever happened to him. Jabe Parsons is for you now, though he headed one wing of the mob agin your pet darky. You see, Jabe wants to prove that his wife was right in the way she first felt about the matter, and he's a strong man.” As if in a dream, so far into the background had even his contest been thrust by the tragedy, Carson heard himself as if from the mouth of another explaining that it was legal business that had brought him thither, and calmly asking the best road from the village to Purdy's farm, whither he intended to go the following morning after breakfast. A few minutes later the supper bell was rung by a negro, who carried it with deafening clangor through the main hall and round the house, and two or three drummers, of the small-trade class, a village storekeeper, and a stock-drover or two clattered in on the uncarpeted floor to the dining-room, and with more noise drew out their chairs and sat down. It happened that Carson knew none of them, and so he sat silent through the meal. Usually of robust appetite, to-night all inclination to physical nourishment had deserted him. Try as he would to fasten his mind upon more cheerful things, the view of Dan Willis's body stretched upon the ground, the ghastly features struggling in the throes of death, came again and again before his eyes with tenacious persistency. Morbidly, he asked himself if that state of mind would continue always. The disaster really had crept upon him through no deliberate fault of his. In fact, he could trace its very beginning to his determination to turn over a new leaf and make a better man of himself--to that and to a natural inborn pity for a persecuted creature, and yet here was he, his hands stained red, unable by any stoicism or philosophy to rid himself of a gloom as deep as the void of space. Genuine man that he was, he pitied the giant who had fallen before him. His mind, trained to logical reasoning in most matters, told him that he was more than justified in what he had done; but then, if so, to what was due this strange shock to his whole being--this restless sense of boundless debt to something never met before, the ominous flapping of wings in a new darkness around him?