ey Champers opened the last envelope and began to read. He stopped
suddenly and gave a long surprised whistle.

Beautiful as the morning was, the man laid down the papers, carefully
locked both doors and drew down the front blinds. He took up the envelope
and read its contents. He read them a second time. Then he put down the
neatly written pages and sat staring at nothing for a long time. He took
them up at length for a third reading.

"Everything comes out at last," he murmured. "Oh, Lord, I'm glad Doc Carey
got hold of me when he did."

Slowly he ran his eyes down the lines as he read in a half whisper:

I was walking down the National pike road toward Cloverdale with little
Leigh in the twilight. Where the railroad crosses Clover Creek on the high
fill we saw Tank Shirley and the young cashier, Terrence Smalley, who had
disappeared after the bank failure. It seems Tank had promised to pay
Smalley to stay away and to find Jim and get his property away from him.
Evidently Tank had not kept his word, for they were quarreling and came to
blows until the cashier's face was cut and bleeding above the eye. There
was a struggle, and one pushed the other over the bank into the deep water
there. Little as Leigh was, she knew one of the men was her father, and we
thought he had pushed Smalley into the creek. He had a sort of paralyzed
arm and could not swim. I tried to make her forget all about it. I
promised her my home and farm some day if she would never tell what she
had seen. She shut her lips, but if she forgot, I cannot tell.

That night I went alone to the fill and found Terrence Smalley with a cut
face and a twisted shoulder lying above the place where Tank went down. I
helped him to my home and dressed his wounds. I may have done wrong not to
deliver him to the authorities, but he had a bad story to tell of Tank's
bank record that would have disgraced the Shirley family in Ohio, so we
made an agreement. He would never make himself known to Leigh, nor in any
way disturb her life nor reveal anything of her father's life to disgrace
her name, if I let him go. And I agreed not to report what I had seen, nor
to tell what I knew to his hurt. He promised me also never to show his
face in Cloverdale again. He was a selfish, dishonest man, who used Tank
Shirley's hatred of his brother and his other sins to hide his own
wrongdoing. But I tried to do my duty by the innocent ones who must
suffer, when I turned him loose with