As soon as this horrible intelligence was communicated the stranger betook himself to his journey again with more speed than ever, not even turning his head when Dominicus invited him to smoke a Spanish cigar and relate all the particulars.  The pedler whistled to his mare and went up the hill, pondering on the doleful fate of Mr. Higginbotham, whom he had known in the way of trade, having sold him many a bunch of long nines and a great deal of pig-tail, lady’s twist and fig tobacco.  He was rather astonished at the rapidity with which the news had spread.  Kimballton was nearly sixty miles distant in a straight line; the murder had been perpetrated only at eight o’clock the preceding night, yet Dominicus had heard of it at seven in the morning, when, in all probability, poor Mr. Higginbotham’s own family had but just discovered his corpse hanging on the St. Michael’s pear tree.  The stranger on foot must have worn seven-league boots, to travel at such a rate.

“Ill-news flies fast, they say,” thought Dominicus Pike, “but this beats railroads.  The fellow ought to be hired to go express with the President’s message.”

The difficulty was solved by supposing that the narrator had made a mistake of one day in the date of the occurrence; so that our friend did not hesitate to introduce the story at every tavern and country-store along the road, expending a whole bunch of Spanish wrappers among at least twenty horrified audiences.  He found himself invariably the first bearer of the intelligence, and was so pestered with questions that he could not avoid filling up the outline till it became quite a respectable narrative.  He met with one piece of corroborative evidence.  Mr. Higginbotham was a trader, and a former clerk of his to whom Dominicus related the facts testified that the old gentleman was accustomed to return home through the orchard about nightfall with the money and valuable papers of the store in his pocket.  The clerk manifested but little grief at Mr. Higginbotham’s catastrophe, hinting—­what the pedler had discovered in his own dealings with him—­that he was a crusty old fellow as close as a vise.  His property would descend to a pretty niece who was now keeping school in Kimballton.

What with telling the news for the public good and driving bargains for his own, Dominicus was so much delayed on the road that he chose to put up at a tavern about five miles short of Parker’s Falls.  After supper, lighting one of his prime cigars, he seated himself in the bar-room and went through the story of the murder, which had grown so fast that it took him half an hour to tell.  There were as many as twenty people in the room, nineteen of whom received it all for gospel.  But the twentieth was an elderly farmer who had arrived on horseback a short time before and was now seated in a corner, smoking his pipe.  When the story was concluded, he rose up very deliberately, brought his chair right in front of Dominicus and stared him full in the face, puffing out the vilest tobacco-smoke the pedler had ever smelt.