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I pressed her then; and she said that he had followed her through the house and tried to kiss her; that she had come around to the front door so as to be in sight of Douglas and me; then that Lamborn had taken the fiddle down and had begun to play it. All the possibilities of Lamborn's attitude dawned on me instantly. How dearly might I pay in some way for my father's desire to be rich!
And at last I told the whole story ... with but two exceptions: I did not produce Lamborn's note to Zoe and I did not tell of Zoe's illness and its cause; of returning from St.
Women now draped themselves in mystery. There were whole realms of subjects that were not talked between the sexes. We managed things by mild indirections, by absurd circumlocutions. I began to think of the letter that Lamborn had written Zoe. I was carrying it in my pocket. Did it not prove Lamborn's interest in Zoe?
I could not bear to bring you such shame and trouble. Don't worry ... don't." Mrs. Brown came in and stood by the bed. She did not speak. She looked at me as if to say that sometimes desperate things have to be done. I understood. I acquiesced. Did Mrs. Brown do it? I never asked. Zoe's sufferings were very great. All this for Lamborn's drunken madness. And then Zoe began to mend.
Of course the single question, they told me, was the manner of Lamborn's meeting his death. But the coroner's jury had the power to bind me to the grand jury for an indictment, and that I wished to escape. Well, I had been threatened, to be sure. But why? If Lamborn wanted Zoe and I had her in my house and kept him from seeing her, was it for a good or a selfish reason?
Every time I came into town I was subjected to wolfish leers from some member of this gang. Evidently they had taken up Lamborn's cause. Something was preying upon him. He was drinking more heavily. Perhaps he was tormented with the thought that I knew his secret and abided some vengeance upon him. Perhaps his conscience tortured him.
Louis and finding Zoe in tears, of what she had told me, of the embarrassment I then found myself in, of my perplexity, of my failure to invite Lamborn to my housewarming and the reason for it, of Lamborn's attitude toward me after that, his menacing looks, his growling insults when he saw me ... of all these things I told with full circumstantiality under the examination of the new state's attorney, and with the whole of the countryside looking on, Whigs and Democrats, and with the audience permeated with slavery and with slavery feeling, at least so far as the present case was concerned.
Reverdy has just told me of Lamborn's threat to come to my farm and take Zoe: that when a girl was once his she was always his. He had said these things at the barber shop. Something came over me.
I was known as a friend of Douglas'. Perhaps I would be trying to involve the state's attorney in an unpopular prosecution. If the prosecuting attorney refused to act that refusal would be known, and credit might be given to any reports that might arise that Zoe was mine before she was Lamborn's, if she ever was his.
With Oregon acquired Douglas' ocean-bound republic was realized. Was it to prove his lasting triumph, or his undoing? I had been gone less than a year. I was eager to reach Chicago, but I had to stop off at Jacksonville to help bury the body of Colonel Hardin. We made his grave near the grave of my father and not far from Lamborn's. What had happened in my absence?
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