The Blue Wall

if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where nobod

finally reached Welstoke's heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time I'd wish to drop back among people like my father's family, who didn't mind the smell of cooking and could get a night's sleep by laying a head on a pillow and weren't bothered by frills. So, though it was p

g to keep clean as the days went by. Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I've often thought since, the way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing so

ning was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and it

a prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too shapeles

-that could toss a God's blessing to you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forge

my adventures, I felt the relief of being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces stream

s, and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping along through the meadows, but I heard her say, "There, there," v

to the white house under the big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it stood very stub

he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the noise and b

tion moves here and there and along with it ways and means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now. "The way of vice, virtue, pass

had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been a wedding present to the Judge's mother from an importer of tea, who had courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can't remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James M

those days, with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs

sel, and looking on anybody as fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to shut the cover down on them and never employ those methods any more. I liked the Jud

a pink mouth hard to beat. Of course I've seen parents fond enough of children, but never any so fond of one that their mouths

has strange instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is som

'll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window,

t looked down the slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows between the two factories up and down the

come up with a lot of clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o'clock-just after I had gone to bed, anyway,

e night toward the river. I could hear something splash once or

ed that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, jus

t like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was

hen he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day, looking v

id he, "you lo

id, half ashamed to

was about to ask you whether you could add to

"Has anything happ

enough. The doctor has been advising it this long time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous

embered the screams. I could hear them again in

is gone!" I

ails you? You have h

I said. "What is this

it must be kept from her at any cost until she is away. A dreadful thing has happened-h

!" I sai

e husband had been heard to say that he would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent f

on the river last night?"

d them," he s

-morrow, and what one didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their wisdom. And yet I have many t

a red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall, went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax,

tle naked back, kicking its feet at

said I, "what

vely. "John Chalmers, the husband, acts like a heeled snake-violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has wai

had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of real life. One said her husband was going to prove an alibi; another said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done that e

y one. Remember that you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions, and so, from now on, I have st

ill that be

ice again this afternoon, and believes he has enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no mo

id. "There won't

fter me, and his voice shook as I ne

east!"

must be found guilty

tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I

man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he had been the one who had discover

eyes snapping. "I've got more evidence for my paper than they can g

d I, "how much d

gri

dollars,

hat for twenty d

!" said he. "What's

then-"

he said. "But you

nture, for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as

orm crawling through my head. Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I'd dust the powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I wished th

teps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers' home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows,

e, just as if she could not see it. "I wa

mething about it that the next one did not know. One girl in the town-a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a belle-could imitate the screams she had heard and d

k, and I think it must have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at meals and never laughed, e

had screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head; he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. Accordin

e long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too beauti

ld not let him g

nce asking for the baby, and I knew when I heard the ga

an came tearing up to the fence, almost fell off a bicy

lephone?"

th the answer fri

"I've gotter have a ciga

the red-haired, freckled reporter a

ed his way ahead of me into the Judg

gasped. "I wa

ld thing, and, along with his perspiration

he said. "I l

!" sa

in his charge to the jury.-Come on, there, New York! Confound

asked, tremblin

an, local plumber. Says strict charge of judge did it. Prisoner gone down to River Flats with counsel.

trying to hide some pain. I had lit the lamp and you cannot begin

id, choking, and then over he went

the first I knew about his being there was when I went back into the library. There he stood, with his tor

e reporter, with his everlasting American good nature. "But I came in to us

ing out his hand, "I know of you ver

aid Roddy,-"

n," the Judge answer

liquor again," said the other. "He wen

eyes snapped. There was a

brandy. You will rest here a while, Mr. Roddy. I sup

ed out," said the re

to the mumble of their voices and waiting up to see if they should want me for anything. And so

l and terror before it reaches us. It spoke to me on those dark back stairs with the moonlight shining on th

sweat start out on my forehead, and I repeated it to mys