An anxious day that was for me. I looked at Alf, now beginning to grow pale under his imprisonment, and I saw his resentment rise and fall as the state's attorney pictured him, waiting, listening with eagerness for the sound of a horse's hoofs. I was to be a lawyer, to defend men and to prosecute them for money, and yet I wondered how that bright young fellow, with the seeming passion of an honest outcry, could stand there and tell the jury that my friend had committed the foulest murder that had ever reddened the criminal annals of his state. Old man Conkwright sat, twirling his thumbs, and occasionally he would nod at the jurymen as if to call their attention to a rank absurdity. But I did not see how he could offset the evidence and the blazing sentences of that impassioned prosecutor. At last Conkwright's time had come, and when he arose and uttered his first word I felt the chill of a disappointment creeping over me. He was slow and his utterance was as cold as if it had issued from a frost-bitten mouth. I went out and walked round the town, to the livery-stable, where a negro was humming a tune as he washed a horse's back; to the drug-store, where a doctor was dressing a brick-bat wound in a drunken man's scalp--I walked out to the edge of the town, where the farming land lay, and then I turned back. I was thinking of my return home, of the sorrow that I should take with me, of those old people--of Guinea. Some one called me, and facing about I recognized the telegraph operator coming across a lot. "Glad to see you," he said, coming up and holding out his hand. "Didn't hear about her, did you?" "Hear about whom?" I asked, not pleased that he should have broken in upon my sorrowful meditation. "Mrs. McHenry." "No, I've heard nothing. What about her?" "Why, there's everything about her. She's my wife--married night before last. Know that piece of calico I pointed out that day, the time I said I had to be mighty careful? Well, she's it. I'll walk on up with you. Run it down--run in panting, you might say. Said I had to have her and she shied at first, but that didn't make any difference, for I was there three times a day till she saw it wasn't any use to shy any longer; so she gave in and I caught the first preacher that happened to be hanging around and he soon pronounced us one and the same kind--something of the same sort. Go right down that street and you'll see calico on my clothes line most any time. Say, it will be a pity if they hang that young fellow. And I'll tell you what I'll do. If they send anything off to any of the newspapers I'll spell his name wrong. Get even with them some way, won't we? Yonder comes my boy and I reckon there's a call for me at the office. They are rushing me now--seems to be the busy season. I've been to the office twice already to-day."