e found the tramp still
standing over her adversary.

"I hope you don't mind, ma'am," he said, with an air of humbleness she
certainly had not seen in him before, "but I think the man's dead." And
he stirred with his foot the heavy figure before him.

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried. "That would be too fearful. He's shocked,
stunned; you cannot have killed him."

But the tramp was persistent. "I'm 'fraid I have," he said. "I done it
before, and it's been the same every time. But I couldn't see a man
of that color frighten a lady like you. My supper was too warm in me,
ma'am. Shall I throw him outside the house?"

"Yes," she said, and then, "No; let us first be sure there is no life in
him." And, hardly knowing what she did, she stooped down and peered into
the glassy eyes of the prostrate man.

Suddenly she turned pale--no, not pale, but ghastly, and cowering back,
shook so that the tramp, into whose features a certain refinement had
passed since he had acted as her protector, thought she had discovered
life in those set orbs, and was stooping down to make sure that this was
so, when he saw her suddenly lean forward and, impetuously plunging her
hand into the negro's throat, tear open the shirt and give one look at
his bared breast.

It was white.

"O God! O God!" she moaned, and lifting the head in her two hands she
gave the motionless features a long and searching look. "Water!" she
cried. "Bring water." But before the now obedient tramp could respond,
she had torn off the woolly wig disfiguring the dead man's head, and
seeing the blond curls beneath had uttered such a shriek that it rose
above the gale and was heard by her distant neighbors.

It was the head and hair of her husband.

* * * * *

They found out afterwards that he had contemplated this theft for
months, that each and every precaution possible to a successful issue to
this most daring undertaking had been made use of and that but for the
unexpected presence in the house of the tramp, he would doubtless have
not only extorted the money from his wife, but have so covered up the
deed by a plausible _alibi_ as to have retained her confidence and that
of his employers.

Whether the tramp killed him out of sympathy for the defenseless
woman or in rage at being disappointed in his own plans has never been
determined. Mrs. Chivers herself thinks he was actuated by a rude sort
of gratitude.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Midnight In Be