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Updated: June 8, 2025
When we got to the middle of Pelham Bridge we all stopped and leaned against the railing and looked down into the swift, swirling current. Braddish tore an old envelop into little pieces and dropped them overboard by pairs, so that we might see which would beat the other to a certain point.
His skin and his eyes were almost as clear as Mary's own, and he had a bold, dashing, independent way with him. But it wasn't often that Braddish could get free of his manifold occupations: his painting contracts and his political engagements. He was by way of growing very influential in local politics, and people predicted an unstintedly successful life for him.
Ellen and I were very firm to have nothing to do with the boot in the oak tree; and we had two picnics in the hollow and played for hours in the adjoining woods without once looking up. It was considered remarkable on all hands that Braddish had not yet been caught.
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. After the first outburst of feeling she had accepted her fate with a stanch reserve and went on with her duties much as usual.
Braddish, as you will have guessed, was a prosperous young man. He was popular, too, and of good habits. People said only against him that he was impulsive and had sudden fits of the devil's own temper, but that he recovered from these in a twinkling and before anything came of them. And even the merest child could see that he thought the world of Mary.
Indeed, she held me so tight that if any of my bones had been cracked by the tumble she must have finished by breaking them. The pathos of her efforts to romp with us as in happier days was lost upon me, I am happy to say. Nor did I, recalling to her what Braddish had said of robbers being inevitably caught, realize that I was stabbing her most cruelly.
Mary told my father, and my father told Mrs. Kirkbride. Mrs. Kirkbride had had a very satisfactory job at painting done for her by Braddish; and although a law-abiding woman, she did not propose personally to assist the law even by holding her tongue.
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. 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.
My father, a very grave man with his jest, said that these were famous detectives, so accoutred as not to excite comment. And their mere presence in it was enough to assure the least rational that Braddish must by now have fled the country. "Their business," he said, "is to close the stable door, if they can find it, and meanwhile to spend the money of the many in the roadhouses of the few."
One ear was always close to the ground, you might say, to hear the first rumor of Braddish, either his capture or his whereabouts, that she might fly to him and comfort him, but the rest of her faculties remained in devoted attendance on my sister and me.
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