“Will you make affidavit,” demanded he, in the tone of a country-justice taking an examination, “that old Squire Higginbotham of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard the night before last and found hanging on his great pear tree yesterday morning?”

“I tell the story as I heard it, mister,” answered Dominicus, dropping his half-burnt cigar.  “I don’t say that I saw the thing done, so I can’t take my oath that he was murdered exactly in that way.”

“But I can take mine,” said the farmer, “that if Squire Higginbotham was murdered night before last I drank a glass of bitters with his ghost this morning.  Being a neighbor of mine, he called me into his store as I was riding by, and treated me, and then asked me to do a little business for him on the road.  He didn’t seem to know any more about his own murder than I did.”

“Why, then it can’t be a fact!” exclaimed Dominicus Pike.

“I guess he’d have mentioned, if it was,” said the old farmer; and he removed his chair back to the corner, leaving Dominicus quite down in the mouth.

Here was a sad resurrection of old Mr. Higginbotham!  The pedler had no heart to mingle in the conversation any more, but comforted himself with a glass of gin and water and went to bed, where all night long he dreamed of hanging on the St. Michael’s pear tree.

To avoid the old farmer (whom he so detested that his suspension would have pleased him better than Mr. Higginbotham’s), Dominicus rose in the gray of the morning, put the little mare into the green cart and trotted swiftly away toward Parker’s Falls.  The fresh breeze, the dewy road and the pleasant summer dawn revived his spirits, and might have encouraged him to repeat the old story had there been anybody awake to bear it, but he met neither ox-team, light wagon, chaise, horseman nor foot-traveller till, just as he crossed Salmon River, a man came trudging down to the bridge with a bundle over his shoulder, on the end of a stick.

“Good-morning, mister,” said the pedler, reining in his mare.  “If you come from Kimballton or that neighborhood, maybe you can tell me the real fact about this affair of old Mr. Higginbotham.  Was the old fellow actually murdered two or three nights ago by an Irishman and a nigger?”

Dominicus had spoken in too great a hurry to observe at first that the stranger himself had a deep tinge of negro blood.  On hearing this sudden question the Ethiopian appeared to change his skin, its yellow hue becoming a ghastly white, while, shaking and stammering, he thus replied: 

“No, no!  There was no colored man.  It was an Irishman that hanged him last night at eight o’clock; I came away at seven.  His folks can’t have looked for him in the orchard yet.”