nging to
his neighbors.

Mr. Simpson was absent from the home circle for the moment because he
had exchanged the Widow Rideout's sleigh for Joseph Goodwin's plough.
Goodwin had lately moved to North Edgewood and had never before met the
urbane and persuasive Mr. Simpson. The Goodwin plough Mr. Simpson
speedily bartered with a man "over Wareham way," and got in exchange
for it an old horse which his owner did not need, as he was leaving
town to visit his daughter for a year, Simpson fattened the aged
animal, keeping him for several weeks (at early morning or after
nightfall) in one neighbor's pasture after another, and then exchanged
him with a Milltown man for a top buggy. It was at this juncture that
the Widow Rideout missed her sleigh from the old carriage house. She
had not used it for fifteen years and might not sit in it for another
fifteen, but it was property, and she did not intend to part with it
without a struggle. Such is the suspicious nature of the village mind
that the moment she discovered her loss her thought at once reverted to
Abner Simpson. So complicated, however, was the nature of this
particular business transaction, and so tortuous the paths of its
progress (partly owing to the complete disappearance of the owner of
the horse, who had gone to the West and left no address), that it took
the sheriff many weeks to prove Mr. Simpson's guilt to the town's and
to the Widow Rideout's satisfaction. Abner himself avowed his complete
innocence, and told the neighbors how a red-haired man with a hare lip
and a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes had called him up one morning
about daylight and offered to swap him a good sleigh for an old cider
press he had layin' out in the dooryard. The bargain was struck, and
he, Abner, had paid the hare-lipped stranger four dollars and
seventy-five cents to boot; whereupon the mysterious one set down the
sleigh, took the press on his cart, and vanished up the road, never to
be seen or heard from afterwards.

"If I could once ketch that consarned old thief," exclaimed Abner
righteously, "I'd make him dance,--workin' off a stolen sleigh on me
an' takin' away my good money an' cider press, to say nothin' o' my
character!"

"You'll never ketch him, Ab," responded the sheriff. "He's cut off the
same piece o' goods as that there cider press and that there character
and that there four-seventy-five o' yourn; nobody ever see any of 'em
but you, and you'll never see 'em again!"