Tramps! answered Stillwater, with one voice, though Stillwater lay somewhat out of the natural highway, and the tramp—­that bitter blossom of civilization whose seed was blown to us from over seas—­was not then so common by the New England roadsides as he became five or six years later.  But it was intolerable not to have a theory; it was that or none, for conjecture turned to no one in the village.  To be sure, Mr. Shackford had been in litigation with several of the corporations, and had had legal quarrels with more than one of his neighbors; but Mr. Shackford had never been victorious in any of these contests, and the incentive of revenge was wanting to explain the crime.  Besides, it was so clearly robbery.

Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric quality in the atmosphere.  The community was in that state of suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately describes.  The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the belief in any man’s guilt; and, indeed, there were men in Stillwater quite capable of disposing of a fellow-creature for a much smaller reward than Mr. Shackford had held out.  In spite of the tramp theory, a harmless tin-peddler, who had not passed through the place for weeks, was dragged from his glittering cart that afternoon, as he drove smilingly into town, and would have been roughly handled if Mr. Richard Shackford, a cousin of the deceased, had not interfered.

As the day wore on, the excitement deepened in intensity, though the expression of it became nearly reticent.  It was noticed that the lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual.  A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling twilight,—­that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying to the nerves than tangible danger.  When a man is smitten inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a cloud,—­when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no faintest trace of his identity,—­the mystery shrouding the deed presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself.  There is something paralyzing in the thought of an invisible hand somewhere ready to strike at your life, or at some life dearer than your own.  Whose hand, and where is it?  Perhaps it passes you your coffee at breakfast; perhaps you have hired it to shovel the snow off your sidewalk; perhaps it has brushed against you in the crowd; or may be you have dropped a coin into the fearful palm at a street corner.  Ah, the terrible unseen hand that stabs your imagination,—­this immortal part of you which is a hundred times more sensitive than your poor perishable body!