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Updated: May 18, 2025
It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.
Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart for the lad who was to feel the vigor of Isom's unsparing arm. There was a lighter step upon the floor, moving across the room like a sudden wind. The bound boy's voice sounded again, clear now and steady, near the top of the stairs where Isom stood. "Put that down! Put that down, I tell you!" he commanded.
He proceeded with Joe in a friendly manner, and went over the whole thing with him again, from the day that he entered Isom's house under bond service to the night of the tragedy. Sam Lucas went with Joe to the gate; he stood with him in the moonlight there; then he accompanied him back to the house, clinging to him like his own garments.
"Don't believe ye more 'n half believed me." Three more horsemen rode up to the gate and came into the light. Every man was armed, and at Isom's puzzled look, Steve caught the lad by the arm and led him around the chimney-corner. He was in high spirits. "'Pears like ole times, Isom. I'm a-goin' fer thet cussed ole Steve Brayton this very night. He's behind Crump.
Joe came back and stood beside the lifeless form of Isom, looking down at him for a moment, pity and sorrow in his face. Then he tiptoed far around the body and took up his hat from the floor where it had fallen in Isom's scramble for the sack of gold. "What are we going to do?" asked Ollie, suddenly afraid. "I'll go after the doctor, but he can't help him any," said Joe.
So she hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread. Now Isom's talk about the lad's blood, and his expression of high confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation.
Then he took up the old rifle, and Isom's bloody coat and shirt, which were also there as exhibits, and dressed Sol down on all of them, working hard to create the impression in the minds of the jurors that Sol Greening was a born liar, and not to be depended on in the most trivial particular.
Even in that turgid moment, when she turned these speculations, guilty hopes, wild fears, in her mind, Isom's eyelids quivered, dropped; and the sounding breath in his nostrils ceased. Isom Chase lay dead upon the floor.
It made all plain at last Rome's and Steve's denials, Isom's dinning on that one theme, and why the boy could not go to Rome and face Martha, with her own blood on his hands. Isom's true motive, too, was plain, and the miller told it brokenly to Steve, who rode away with a low whistle to tell it broadcast, and left the old man rocking his body like a woman.
Perhaps it is because chivalry is such a rare quality among the business activities of this life, that none of them believed he was shielding Isom's wife, and that he was innocent of any wrong himself. They did not approve the attempt of the coroner to drag her into it. The shrewd insight of the little man cost him a good many votes that day.
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