"He knew nothing of the marriage till he came to see Alice on the next Sunday as he always did. He didn't live in Oldfield at that time. He had gone away soon after another unlucky affair which most men wouldn't have worried about, but which seems to have had a lifelong effect upon him. He was always a sensitive, high-strung fellow and deeply religious--full of lofty ideals and all that sort of thing--even then, when he was hardly more than a lad. He had come here only a week or so before to take an assistant's place in the clerk's office. He was a cousin of Jack Mitchell, the county clerk--that's the way he happened to come. Well, Jack Mitchell was a politician and as high a talker and as low a doer as was to be found betwixt the Cumberland and Green River, which is saying a good deal. I reckon he couldn't be more than matched in these days. I haven't noticed much change in politicians during the last quarter of a century. Jack had been elected by a large majority, and was reelected, and had his hand fairly on a higher rung of the political ladder, when he made a false step and slipped. The trouble came from a foolish quarrel caused by drink. Jack Mitchell always was quarrelsome when in liquor, and on that day he happened to accuse another Kentuckian of cowardice. That, of course, was crossing the dead-line. It was just the same then that it is now and always will be, till our blood and training are different. And the fact that the man who had been branded as a coward was a worthless loafer, made no more difference then then it would make now. The wretch who had been 'insulted' rose up, as soon as he was sober enough, and borrowed a shot-gun and went to wipe out his dishonor, just as if he had been a real gentleman. Jack, with his usual luck, was not in the office when his enemy, who was still drinking heavily, suddenly appeared in the doorway, levelling the gun. He was not so drunk, though, that he didn't know that he was aiming at a boy whom he had never seen before, in place of the man whom he had come to kill. He knew it well enough, for he muttered something about killing the young one if he couldn't get the old one. But John Stanley was too quick for him. Jack's pistol lay handy, as it always did, as pistols always do, hereabouts. The boy hardly knew what was happening before he had shot dead a man whose name he didn't know--a man whom he had never seen or heard of before." "What a strange story," Lynn said. "I think I have never heard a stranger one." "Oh, I don't know about it's being strange. Of course somebody had to be killed," old lady Gordon responded indifferently. "Somebody had to be killed--and why?" repeated Lynn, wonderingly; for, although to the manner born he was not to the manner bred.