Woodell’s face had been something worth seeing while Harlson was speaking.  He had followed the words of his late antagonist closely.  He grasped in a general way the intent expressed.  There was a radiance on his rough features.

“Do you really mean that?”

“Of course I do.  What should I say it for if I didn’t?”

“Then it will be all right.”

“But do you want to fight?”

“No, I don’t.  I won’t say you could lick me.  It was partly luck before.  I won’t give up that way.  But you might.  That doesn’t matter.  I’m sorry I tried to kill you.  I was crazy.  You would have been, in my place.  And you won’t have anything to do with Jenny again?  Oh, Harlson!”

And the two shook hands, and Harlson went back to his bed on the clover-mow.  He thought he had done a great and philosophically noble deed—­remember, this was but a boy little over twenty—­and he slept like a lamb.  And next evening he went over to Woodell’s home and said he wanted some supper, and after the meal laughed at Woodell, and said he was going off to another farm to pitch quoits until it got too dark, and the two young men walked down the road together and exchanged some confidences, and when they parted each was on good terms with the other.  This was strange, following an attempted murder, but such things happen in real life.  And it may be that Woodell had the worst of the bargain in that conversation.

He was better equipped for the winning of Jenny, but the troubled man with whom he had been talking had reached out blindly for aid in another direction.  Not much satisfaction was the result.  Woodell was of the kind who, if religious at all, believe without much reasoning, but Harlson had repeated to him the reasoning of the Hindoo skeptic.  Woodell had at least intelligence enough to follow the line of thought, and, in after time, when he was a family man and deacon, the lines would recur to vex him sorely.

And Jenny did not pine away and die because she saw little more of Harlson.  He met her and explained briefly that they had been doing wrong, and that he and Woodell had talked.  She turned pale, then red, but said little.  Of the struggle in the night Jenny never learned.  She inferred, of course, that her lover had gone in a straightforward way to Harlson, and that his demands had been acceded to.  She was gratified, perhaps, that she had become a person of much importance.  She thought more of Woodell and less of Harlson, because of the issue of the debate, as she understood it, and, when the first pique and passion were over, became resigned enough to the outlook.  She had been on the verge of sin, but she was not the only woman in the world to carry a secret.  Woodell’s pleadings were met with yielding, and the wedding occurred within a month.  Perhaps she made a better wife because her husband did not know the truth in detail, and she felt the burden of a debt, but that is doubtful.