had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited
girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman's shawl and a woman's
poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns;
how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were
friendly--actually friendly, this being underscored--with the more
personable of the young Yankee officers; how half the town was in
mourning for a son or brother dead or wounded; how a new and sweetly
sentimental song, called Rosalie, the Prairie Flower, was being much
sung at the time--and had it reached the army yet? how old Mrs. Hobbs
had been exiled to Canada for seditious acts and language and had
departed northward between two files of bluecoats, reviling the Yankees
with an unbitted tongue at every step; how So-and-So had died or married
or gone refugeeing below the enemy's line into safely Southern
territory; how this thing had happened and that thing had not.

The old judge read on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a
tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came
to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of
it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with
the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to
him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and
misunderstanding, he read there the answer to the town's oldest, biggest
tragedy and knew what it was that all this time had festered, like
buried thorns, in the flesh of those two men, his comrades and friends.
He dropped the paper, and up and down the wide, empty porch he stumped
on his short stout legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with
indignation and pity for the blind and bitter uselessness of it all.

"Ah hah!" he said to himself over and over again understandingly. "Ah
hah!" And then: "Next to a mean man, a mean woman is the meanest thing
in this whole created world, I reckin. I ain't sure but what she's the
meanest of the two. And to think of what them two did between 'em--she
writin' that hellish black lyin' tale to 'Lonzo Pike and he puttin' off
hotfoot to Abner Tilghman to poison his mind with it and set him like a
flint against his own flesh and blood! And wasn't it jest like Lon Pike
to go and git himself killed the next day after he got that there
letter! And wasn't it jest like her to up and die before the truth could
be brought home to her! And wasn't it like them two stubborn, set,