But the shadows began to grow long now and presently Braddish had to leave us to attend a meeting in Westchester, and I remember how he turned and waved, just before the Boulevard dips to the causeway, and how Mary recollected something that she had meant to say and ran after him a little way calling, and he did not hear. And she came back laughing, and red in the face, and breathing quick. Two days later my father, who had started for the early train, came driving back to the house as if he had missed it. But he said, no, and his face was very grave--he had heard a piece of news that greatly concerned Mary, and he had come back to tell her. He went into the study with my mother, and presently they sent for Mary and she went in to them. A few minutes later, through the closed door, Ellen and I heard a sudden, wailing cry. Poor Braddish, it seems, in one of his ungovernable tempers had shot a man to death, and fled away no one knew whither. II The man killed was named Hagan. He was a red-faced, hard-drinking brute, not without sharp wits and a following--or better, a heeling. There had been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried a circumstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as the law lay things looked bad for Braddish. That he had not walked into the sheriff's office to give himself up made it look as if he himself felt the unjustifiability of his act, and it was predicted that when he was finally captured it would be to serve a life sentence at the very least. The friends of the late Hagan would hear of nothing less than hanging. It was a great pity (this was my father's attitude): Hagan was a bad lot and a good riddance; Braddish was an excellent young man, except for a bit of a temper, and here the law proposed to revenge the bad man upon the other forever and ever. And it was right and proper for the law so to do, more's the pity. But it was not Braddish that would be hit hardest, said my father, and here came in the inscrutable hand of Providence--it was Mary.