The ambulance arrived, and the two attendants who came with it brought in a stretcher and carried young Granitch away.  Jimmie opened the windows to get rid of the odour of ether, and meantime he and Lizzie sat for hours discussing every aspect of the dreadful scene they had witnessed, and speculating as to its meaning.  When Jimmie investigated the roll of bills which had been slipped into his hand, he found that there were ten of them, new, crisp, and bright yellow, each having the figure twenty printed upon it.  It was more money than these two humble little people had ever had or expected to have in all their lives.  It was literally blood-money they felt, but it would be hard to see who would be benefited if they rejected it.  Certainly the deed which had been done that night could not be undone—­not for all the money that old Granitch had heaped up in his vaults.

Jimmie kept quiet, as he had been bidden, and apparently no one told about his part in the affair—­no reporters came out to his country home to ask for interviews.  But when he went to the cross-roads store a couple of nights later he found that the storm was all over—­nobody was talking or thinking about anything else.  The news, in fact, had gone by telegraph all over the world, and wherever people read it they shuddered with horror, and the Socialists had a choice illustration of the effect of excessive wealth upon morals.

There were half a dozen versions of the story, Jimmie found; some declared that the outraged husband had caught young Granitch in his home and had fetched a surgeon there; others that he had taken him to a hospital; others that the operation had been performed in a road-house near by.  But none mentioned the tenant-house on the farm of John Cutter, and Jimmie wrapped himself in his pride of superior knowledge, and let the loungers in the country store chatter on.  He would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the hospital and vanished, no one knew where.  And they never knew; never again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way!  His grim old father’s hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that his heart was eaten out with grief and rage and shame.

Jimmie and his wife held numerous confabulations over those twenty-dollar bills.  What should they do with their fortune?  The Worker, always in need of funds, was just now issuing bonds in small denominations, and Jimmie could not imagine any better financial investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not be made to see it.  And then his eye was caught by an advertisement of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it above suspicion.  But again Lizzie blocked the way.  She begged her visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that half of it belonged to her anyhow—­had she not done her part to earn it?  “What part?” Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept quiet—­and what more had he done?