I went over to where the two were chatting under the bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think, while I smoked my pipe and gossiped so sociably with that placid friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treason to say so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet. VIII. THE MURDER-ROCK.