The Tocsin was quoted on street corners that morning, in shop and store and office, wherever people talked of the Cory murder; and that was everywhere, for the people of Canaan and of the country roundabout talked of nothing else.  Women chattered of it in parlor and kitchen; men gathered in small groups on the street and shook their heads ominously over it; farmers, meeting on the road, halted their teams and loudly damned the little man in the Canaan jail; milkmen lingered on back porches over their cans to agree with cooks that it was an awful thing, and that if ever any man deserved hanging, that there Fear deserved it —­his lawyer along with him!  Tipsy men hammered bars with fists and beer-glasses, inquiring if there was no rope to be had in the town; and Joe Louden, returning to his office from the little restaurant where he sometimes ate his breakfast, heard hisses following him along Main Street.  A clerk, a fat-shouldered, blue-aproned, pimple-cheeked youth, stood in the open doors of a grocery, and as he passed, stared him in the face and said “Yah!” with supreme disgust.

Joe stopped.  “Why?” he asked, mildly.

The clerk put two fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly in derision.  “You’d ort to be run out o’ town!” he exclaimed.

“I believe,” said Joe, “that we have never met before.”

“Go on, you shyster!”

Joe looked at him gravely.  “My dear sir,” he returned, “you speak to me with the familiarity of an old friend.”

The clerk did not recover so far as to be capable of repartee until Joe had entered his own stairway.  Then, with a bitter sneer, he seized a bad potato from an open barrel and threw it at the mongrel, who had paused to examine the landscape.  The missile failed, and Respectability, after bestowing a slightly injured look upon the clerk, followed his master.

In the office the red-bearded man sat waiting.  Not so red-bearded as of yore, however, was Mr. Sheehan, but grizzled and gray, and, this morning, gray of face, too, as he sat, perspiring and anxious, wiping a troubled brow with a black silk handkerchief.

“Here’s the devil and all to pay at last, Joe,” he said, uneasily, on the other’s entrance.  “This is the worst I ever knew; and I hate to say it, but I doubt yer pullin’ it off.”

“I’ve got to, Mike.”

“I hope on my soul there’s a chanst of it!  I like the little man, Joe.”

“So do I.”

“I know ye do, my boy.  But here’s this Tocsin kickin’ up the public sentiment; and if there ever was a follerin’ sheep on earth, it’s that same public sentiment!”

“If it weren’t for that”—­Joe flung himself heavily in a chair—­“there’d not be so much trouble.  It’s a clear enough case.”

“But don’t ye see,” interrupted Sheehan, “the Tocsin’s tried it and convicted him aforehand?  And that if things keep goin’ the way they’ve started to-day, the gran’ jury’s bound to indict him, and the trial jury to convict him?  They wouldn’t dare not to!  What’s more, they’ll want to!  And they’ll rush the trial, summer or no summer, and—­”