“What for?”

“They think he stabbed his cousin.”

“My sakes!  Do you s’pose he did, Jim?”

“I don’t know, mother.  I wasn’t there.”

“I s’pose the young man that did it is this girl’s beau, and that’s why she’s so crazy to get him out.”

Jim played the merry measure softly, and made no reply.

His mother stood before him quivering with curiosity, which she restrained lest it defeat its own ends.  She had learned early that too impetuous feminine questioning is apt to strike a dead-wall in the masculine mind.

“I didn’t quite understand what she meant about a knife,” she ventured, with an eager glance at her son.  He played a little louder, as if he did not hear.

“I s’pose she come here, walked all that way from Ware Centre, this dreadful night, ’cause she thought you could help to get her young man out of prison.”

Jim nodded as he fiddled.

“But I can’t see how your seein’ her brother give her a knife could do any good.  Of course that sweet, pretty girl didn’t do it herself.  But you didn’t see her brother give her the knife, Jim?”

“Didn’t you hear me say I didn’t?” replied Jim, with sudden force.  “Don’t let’s talk any more about it, mother.  It’s a dreadful piece of work, anyway.  I don’t half know what it means myself.  That poor girl is ’most crazy because that fellow is in prison.  That’s why she came on this wild-goose chase after me.  You can’t tell anything by what she says.”

“Wasn’t he a nice kind of a fellow before this happened, Jim?”

“No, he was a scamp,” said Jim Otis, angrily.  He struck into the “Fisher’s Hornpipe” with fury, regardless of the girl up-stairs.

“Land sakes, Jim, don’t fiddle quite so loud as that—­I’m dreadful afraid she’ll hear,” said his mother.  “I shouldn’t thought a girl that looks as sweet as she does would ever have taken up with a scamp.”

“The sweetest girls are the worst fools,” answered Jim, bitterly, but he obeyed his mother and played less loudly.  The shadows of the winter night might have footed it to the soft measures of the hornpipe which Jim Otis played on his fiddle.  His mother could scarcely hear it in the pantry when she went in there to set away the supper dishes.  She shut the door every time, lest her son should feel the icy air from the fireless closet.  She had always a belief that Jim was delicate, and took a certain pride in it, although she could not have told why.

Everything that was in the least likely to freeze to its injury had to be removed from the cold pantry and set on the hearth that bitter night.  It was quite a while before her soft, heavy pattering, which jarred the house when she stepped on certain parts of the floor, ceased, and she took her knitting-work and sat down in her rocking-chair opposite her son.