us peremptorily away. But the widow kept
straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and
an American. The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even
eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day,
and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and
children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three
things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light
glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its
place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever
saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for
that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing
that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know,
by either sight or hearing, when I left the room.

When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said, abruptly--

'I will tell you my story.'

A DYING MAN S CONFESSION

Then he went on as follows:--

I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to
die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too.
You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find
opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange
experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my
history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you
will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will
willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.

Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to
settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I
had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely
good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.

One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden
lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other,
in a hoarse whisper, 'I told