What followed was mere drifting circumstance,--a quicker walking over the path,--that was all.Do you want to hear the end of it?You wish me to make a tragic story out of it?Why,in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such tragedies:hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas;hints that here a power was lost to heaven,--that there a soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow.
Commonplace enough the hints are,--jocose sometimes,done up in rhyme.
Doctor May a month after the night I have told you of,was reading to his wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper:an unusual thing,--these police-reports not being,in general,choice reading for ladies;but it was only one item he read.
"Oh,my dear!You remember that man I told you of,that we saw at Kirby's mill?--that was arrested for robbing Mitchell?Here he is;just listen:--'Circuit Court.Judge Day.Hugh Wolfe,operative in Kirby &John's Loudon Mills.Charge,grand larceny.Sentence,nineteen years hard labor in penitentiary.
Scoundrel!Serves him right!After all our kindness that night!Picking Mitchell's pocket at the very time!"His wife said something about the ingratitude of that kind of people,and then they began to talk of something else.
Nineteen years!How easy that was to read!What a simple word for Judge Day to utter!Nineteen years!Half a lifetime!
Hugh Wolfe sat on the window-ledge of his cell,looking out.
His ankles Were ironed.Not usual in such cases;but he had made two desperate efforts to escape."Well,"as Haley,the jailer,said,"small blame to him!Nineteen years'inprisonment was not a pleasant thing to look forward to."Haley was very good-natured about it,though Wolfe had fought him savagely.
"When he was first caught,"the jailer said afterwards,in telling the story,"before the trial,the fellow was cut down at once,--laid there on that pallet like a dead man,with his hands over his eyes.Never saw a man so cut down in my life.Time of the trial,too,came the queerest dodge of any customer I ever had.Would choose no lawyer.Judge gave him one,of course.