But when she was come home again and they were alone and none near except the cousin and the cousin’s wife and their children, the mother wiped her eyes and said to her elder son more quietly yet in a fever, too, “But this is letting good time pass. Tell me all, for we may save him yet. We have the night. What was his true crime? We will take all we have and save him yet.” There passed between the son and son’s wife a look at this, not evil, but as though forbearance were very near its end in them, and then the son began, “I do not know what the crime is rightly, but they call him what I told you, a communist. A new word--I have heard it often, and when I asked what it was it seemed to be a sort of robber band. I asked the guard there at the gaol, who stands with a gun across his arm, and he answered, ‘What is he? Why, one who would even take your land from you, goodman, for himself, and one who contrives against the state and so must die with all his fellows.’ Aye, that is his crime.” The mother listened hard to this, the candle’s light falling on her face that glistened with dried tears, and she said astounded, her voice trembling while she strove to make it firm, “But I do not think it can be so. I never heard him say a word like this. I never heard of such a crime. To kill a man, to rob a house, to let a parent starve, these be crimes. But how can land be robbed? Can he roll it up like cloth and take it away with him and hide it somewhere?” “I do not know, mother,” said the son, his head hanging, his hands hanging loose between his knees as he sat upon a little stool. He wore his one robe still, but he had tucked the edge into his girdle, for he was not used to robes, and now he put it in more firmly and then he said slowly, “I do not know what else was said, a great deal here and there in the town we heard, because so many are to be killed tomorrow and they make a holiday. What else was said, my cousin?”