it that
_cachorra_?"

Here was something out of their calculations; something for them,
mentally, to chew on. Mystification is a good thing sometimes. It
gives the brain a fillip, stirs memory, puts the gears of
imagination in mesh. One man, an old, tobacco-chewing fellow, began
to stare harder at the face on the floor. Something moved in his
intellect.

"No, but look here now, by God----"

He had even stopped chewing. But he was forestalled by another.

"Say now, if it don't look like that fellow Wood, himself. The bank
fellow--that was burned--remember? Himself."

"That _cachorra_ was not burned. Not that Wood. You darned fool!"

Boaz spoke from his chair. They hardly knew his voice, emerging from
its long silence; it was so didactic and arid.

"That _cachorra_ was not burned. It was my boy that was burned. It
was that _cachorra_ called my boy upstairs. That _cachorra_ killed
my boy. That _cachorra_ put his clothes on my boy, and he set my
house on fire. I knew that all the time. Because when I heard those
feet come out of my house and go away, I knew they were the feet of
that _cachorra_ from the bank. I did not know where he was going to.
Something said to me--you better ask him where he is going to. But
then I said, you are foolish. He had the money from the bank. I did
not know. And then my house was on fire. No, it was not my boy that
went away; it was that _cachorra_ all the time. You darned fools!
Did you think I was waiting for my own boy?"

"Now I show you all," he said at the end. "And now I can get hanged."

No one ever touched Boaz Negro for that murder. For murder it was in
the eye and letter of the Law. The Law in a small town is sometimes
a curious creature; it is sometimes blind only in one eye.

Their minds and imaginations in that town were arrested by the
romantic proportions of the act. Simply, no one took it up. I
believe the man, Wood, was understood to have died of heart-failure.

When they asked Boaz why he had not told what he knew as to the
identity of that fugitive in the night, he seemed to find it hard to
say exactly. How could a man of no education define for them his own
but half-denied misgivings about the Law, his sense of oppression,
constraint and awe, of being on the defensive, even, in an abject way,
his skepticism? About his wanting, come what might, to "keep clear
of the Law"?

He did say this, "You would have laughed at me."

And this, "If I told folk it was Woo