Mrs. Newbolt stood at the roadside, looking after the conveyance which was taking her son away to jail, until a bend behind a tall hedge hid it from her eyes. She made no further attempt to find sympathy or support among her neighbors, who looked at her curiously as she stood there, and turned away selfishly when she faced them. Back over the road that she had hurried along that morning she trudged, slowly and without spirit, her feet like stones. As she went, she tried to arrange the day's happenings in her mind. All was confusion there. The one plain thing, the thing that persisted and obtruded, was that they had arrested Joe on a charge that was at once hideous and unjust. Evening was falling when she reached the turn of the road and looked ahead to her home. She had no heart for supper, no heart to lift the latch of the kitchen door and enter there. There was no desire in her heart but for her son, and no comfort in the prospect of her oncoming night. CHAPTER IX THE SEALED ENVELOPE In the light of Joe's reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been found in the burst bag on Isom's breast; and Joe's declaration that he had not seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of that community believed the verdict of the coroner's jury to be just. This refusal of Joe's to talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter's death. But it looked more like bull-headedness to them. "Don't the darned fool know he's pokin' his head under the gallus?" they asked. What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin' there in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that there money come from, gentlemen? That's what I want you to tell _me_! Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to group, and which nobody could answer, as they stood discussing it after Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving them the weight of his experience. "That Newbolt's deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen," he said, shaking his serious whiskers. "There's a lot more behind this case than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was planned away ahead. It's been a long time since I've seen anybody on the witness-stand as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt boy. He knew just what to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we'll fetch it out of him--or somebody else."