“I don’t understand you,” said Mrs. Tucker coldly, turning towards the door.  But with a flying leap across the counter her relentless adversary stood between her and retreat.

“You don’t understand!  Perhaps you don’t understand that your husband not only stole the hard labor of these men, but even the little money they brought here and trusted to his thieving hands.  Perhaps you don’t know that he stole my husband’s hard earnings, mortgaged these very goods you want to buy, and that he is to-day a convicted thief, a forger, and a runaway coward.  Perhaps, if you can’t understand me, you can read the newspaper.  Look!” She exultingly opened the paper the sheriff had been reading aloud, and pointed to the displayed headlines.  “Look! there are the very words, ‘Forgery, Swindling, Embezzlement!’ Do you see?  And perhaps you can’t understand this.  Look!  ’Shameful Flight.  Abandons his Wife.  Runs off with a Notorious—­’”

“Easy, old gal, easy now.  D—­n it!  Will you dry up?  I say.  Stop!”

It was too late!

The sheriff had dashed the paper from the woman’s hand, but not until Mrs. Tucker had read a single line, a line such as she had sometimes turned from with weary scorn in her careless perusal of the daily shameful chronicle of domestic infelicity.  Then she had coldly wondered if there could be any such men and women; and now!  The crowd fell back before her; even the virago was silenced as she looked at her face.  The humorist’s face was as white, but not as immobile, as he gasped, “Christ! if I don’t believe she knew nothin’ of it!”

For a moment the full force of such a supposition, with all its poignancy, its dramatic intensity, and its pathos, possessed the crowd.  In the momentary clairvoyance of enthusiasm they caught a glimpse of the truth, and by one of the strange reactions of human passion they only waited for a word of appeal or explanation from her lips to throw themselves at her feet.  Had she simply told her story they would have believed her; had she cried, fainted, or gone into hysterics, they would have pitied her.  She did neither.  Perhaps she thought of neither, or indeed of anything that was then before her eyes.  She walked erect to the door and turned upon the threshold.  “I mean what I say,” she said calmly.  “I don’t understand you.  But whatever just claims you have upon my husband will be paid by me, or by his lawyer, Captain Poindexter.”

She had lost the sympathy but not the respect of her hearers.  They made way for her with sullen deference as she passed out on the platform.  But her adversary, profiting by the last opportunity, burst into an ironical laugh.

“Captain Poindexter, is it?  Well, perhaps he’s safe to pay your bill, but as for your husband’s—­”