I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, and, turning to look as I passed, at the Catholic church, had caught an idle glimpse of the folk in the street. Among them was a woman at the wooden gateway of a small house, hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing it open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she did not lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed and the cursory glance I gave, to be listening to what somebody was saying to her through the window. Had I been only a few yards nearer! At the moment that I saw her, the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified eyes upon a face--a grim and cruel face--that glared at her from a window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at her breast. And the next instant, just as I had turned the corner, there was the report of fire-arms. It did not occur to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a cry, and then a second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her knitted shawl over her head, and the wind blowing her light dress to one side. I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the shots had only the merest flash of a connexion in my mind. But after a few steps a man came running past me, going perhaps for the doctor, or the police, or the coroner, and the scared look on his face suddenly once more wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the wicket. So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the middle of the road, with a man stooping over her and two women, transfixed by sudden terror into attitudes that were most tragic, I saw the woman lying. Her face was turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had fallen back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was already dead. And her murderer? He too had gone to his last account; and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha road, with the wind raising wisps of dust about the horror-stricken group, and thought of the two dead bodies lying there, one in the roadway, the other in the house close by, my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before their Maker, and that perhaps she, the poor mangled woman, was pleading for mercy for the man, her husband, the lover of her youth--her murderer. --