The next day, before she left her room, Mrs Ogilvy took the newspaper, which she had laid carefully aside, and read for the first time--locking her door first, which was a thing she had scarcely done all her life before--the story of the crime which had thrown a shadow over her son, and had made him “cut and run,” as he said, for his life. She had to read it three or four times over before she could make out what it meant, and even then her understanding was not very clear. For one thing, she had not, as was natural, the remotest idea what “road agents” were. Mercifully for her: for I believe, though I know as little as she, that it means, not to put too fine a point upon it, highwaymen, neither more nor less. A party of these men--she thought it must mean some kind of travelling merchants; not perhaps a brilliant career, but no harm in it, no harm in it!--had been long about the country, a country of which she had never heard the name, in a half-settled State equally unknown, and at length had been traced to their headquarters. They had been pursued hotly by the Sheriff for some time. To Mrs Ogilvy a sheriff meant an elderly gentleman in correct legal costume, a person of serious importance, holding his courts and giving his judgments. She could not realise to herself the Sheriff-Substitute of Eskshire riding wildly over moss and moor after any man; but no doubt in America it was different. It was proved that the road agents had sworn vengeance against him, and that whoever met him first was pledged to shoot him, whether he himself could escape or not. The meeting took place by chance at a roadside shanty in the midst of the wilds, and the Sheriff was shot, before his party had perceived the other, by a premeditated well-directed bullet straight to the heart. Who had fired it? The most likely person was the leader of the band, of whom the Western journalist gave a sensational history, and to secure him was the object of the police; but there were half-a-dozen others who might have done it, and whom it was of the utmost importance to secure, if only in the hope that one of them might turn Queen’s evidence. (I don’t know what they call this in America, nor, indeed, anything but what I have heard vaguely reported of such matters. The better instructed will pardon and rectify for themselves.) Among these, but at the end--heaven be praised, at the end!--was the name of Robert. The band had dispersed in different directions and fled, all but one, who was killed.