At this Charlton’s countenance fell, and he refused to make any explanations or answer any questions.  He was purposely kept over one day in Metropolisville in hope that something passing between him and his friends, who were permitted to have free access to him, might bring further evidence to light.  But Charlton sat, pale and dejected, ready enough to converse about anything else, but declining to say one word in regard to his guilt or innocence of the crime charged.  It is not strange that some of his best friends accepted the charge as true, and only tried to extenuate the offense on the ground that the circumstances made the temptation a very great one, and that the motive was not mercenary.  Others stood out that it would yet be discovered that Plausaby had stolen the warrant, until half-a-dozen people remembered that Plausaby himself had been in Red Owl at that very time—­he had spent a week there laying out a marshy shore in town lots down to the low-water mark, and also laying out the summit of a bluff three hundred and fifty feet high and sixty degrees steep.  These sky and water lots were afterward sold to confiding Eastern speculators, and a year or two later the owner of the water privileges rowed all over his lots in a skiff.  Whether the other purchaser used a balloon to reach his is not known.  But the operation of staking out these ineligible “additions” to the city of Red Owl had attracted much attention, and consequently Plausaby’s alibi was readily established.  So that the two or three who still believed Albert innocent did so by “naked faith,” and when questioned about it, shook their heads, and said that it was a great mystery.  They could not understand it, but they did not believe him guilty.  Isabel Marlay believed in Albert’s innocence as she believed the hard passages in the catechism.  She knew it, she believed it, she could not prove it, but she would not hear to anything else.  She was sure of his innocence, and that was enough.  For when a woman of that sort believes anything, she believes in spite of all her senses and all reason.  What are the laws of evidence to her!  She believes with the heart.

Poor Mrs. Plausaby, too, sat down in a dumb despair, and wept and complained and declared that she knew her Albert had notions and such things, but people with such notions wouldn’t do anything naughty.  Albert wouldn’t, she knew.  He hadn’t done any harm, and they couldn’t find out that he had.  Katy was gone, and now Albert was in trouble, and she didn’t know what to do.  She thought Isa might do something, and not let all these troubles come on her in this way.  For the poor woman had come to depend on Isa not only in weighty matters, such as dresses and bonnets, but also in all the other affairs of life.  And it seemed to her a grievous wrong that Isabel, who had saved her from so many troubles, should not have kept Katy from drowning and Albert from prison.