e announcement of the verdict of the coroner's jury the prisoner
was released, and returned to Chicago by the same train that bore the
remains of the dead engineer.

Guerin, whose heart was as big as his body and as tender as a woman's,
hastened to the home of his late companion and begged the grief-sick
widow to allow him to be of some service to her. His appearance (she had
known him by sight) excited her greatly for she knew he had been
arrested as the murderer of her husband.

The news he brought of the verdict of the coroner's jury, which his very
presence corroborated, quieted her and she began to ask how it had all
happened.

Guerin began cautiously to explain how the engineer had died, still
remembering the lawyer's advice, but before he had gone a dozen words
the poor woman wept so bitterly that he was obliged to discontinue the
sad story.

Then came the corpse, borne by a few faithful friends--some of the
Brotherhood and some of the railway company--who met thus on neutral
ground and in the awful presence of death forgot their feud. Not an eye
was dry while the little company stood about as the mother and boy bent
over the coffin and poured out their grief, and the little girl, not old
enough to understand, but old enough to weep, clung and sobbed at her
mother's side.

The next day they came again and carried Cowels away and buried him in
the new and thinly settled side of the grave-yard, where the lots were
not too high, and where for nearly four years their second son, a baby
boy, had slept alone. Another day came and the men who had mixed their
tears at the engineer's grave passed one another without a nod of
recognition, and, figuratively speaking, stood again to their respective
guns.

One man had been greatly missed at the funeral, and the recollection
that he had been greatly wronged by the dead man did not excuse him in
the eyes of the widow. Dan Moran had been a brother, a father,
everything to her husband and now when he was needed most, he came not
at all. Death, she reasoned, should level all differences and he should
forgive all and come to her and the children in their distress. At the
end of a week this letter came:

_County Jail, ---- 1888._

_My dear Mrs. Cowels_:

_Every day since George's death I have wanted to write you to
assure you of my innocence and of my sympathy for you in this the
hour of your sorrow. These are dreadful times. Be brave, and
belie