"The ladies at the judge's were mistaken, that's all, and this proves it.

It's easy enough to understand: they were frightened by the storm, and, watching a fence a quarter-mile away by flashes of lightning, any one would have been confused, and imagined all the horrors on earth.

I don't deny but what I believed it for a while, and I don't deny but the Cross-Roads is pretty tough, but you've done a good deal here already, to-day, and we're saved in time from a mistake that would have turned out mighty bad.

This settles it.

Homer got a wire from Rouen to come over there, soon as they got track of the first man; that was when we saw him on the Rouen accommodation." A slightly cracked voice, yet a huskily tuneful one, was lifted quaveringly on the air from the roadside, where an old man and a yellow dog sat in the dust together, the latter reprieved at the last moment, his surprised head rakishly garnished with a hasty wreath of dog-fennel daisies.
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground, While we go marching on!" Three-quarters of an hour later, the inhabitants of the Cross-Roads, saved, they knew not how; guilty; knowing nothing of the fantastic pendulum of opinion, which, swung by the events of the day, had marked the fatal moment of guilt, now on others, now on them, who deserved it--these natives and refugees, conscious of atrocity, dumfounded by a miracle, thinking the world gone mad, hovered together in a dark, ragged mass at the crossing corners, while the skeleton of the rotting buggy in the slough rose behind them against the face of the west.