nd a short sketch of the deceased
Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
cloud from his life.

"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
I'd have this Frenchman Balzac clear off the boards when it came to
describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've been in this
business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
anything that was the beat of this thing.

"Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning
from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.

"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
Bledsoe?'

"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
memories--not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
being always with