Ed Hall the factory superintendent, the man who had struck the blow that had felled the little man, stepped forward and explained the tragic happenings of the evening in town. The factory superintendent had remembered that as a boy he had once worked for a few weeks on the farm of which the wood beside the road was a part, and that on Sunday afternoons the harness maker had come to the farm with his wife and the two people had gone to walk in the very place where he had just been found. “I had a hunch he would be out here,” he boasted. “I figured it out. Crowds started out of town in all directions, but I cut out alone. Then I happened to see this fellow and just for company I brought him along.” He put up his hand and, looking at Tom, tapped his forehead. “Cracked,” he declared, “he always was. A fellow I knew saw him once in that woods,” he said pointing. “Somebody had shot a squirrel and he took on about it as though he had lost a child. I said then he was crazy, and he has sure proved I was right.” At a word from her father Clara went to sit on the front seat on Hugh's knees. Her body trembled and she was cold with fear. As her father had told the story of Jim Gibson's triumph over Joe Wainsworth she had wanted passionately to kill that blustering fellow. Now the thing was done. In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women in the world who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become. She had wanted Jim Gibson killed and it had been done. As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth's shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place. At the thought of the same place, now become the scene of a desperate killing, her body shook so that she clutched at Hugh's arms, striving to steady herself.