"Dead."

"Dead? Did you kill him?" The half-kindly look disappeared from her
eyes, and the hard lines settled into an expression of malevolent
repulsiveness.

"He was my best friend," I said sadly; and then I described the leading
events of the tragedy I had witnessed.

The old woman listened closely, and with hardly the movement of a
muscle, to the tale I told.

"And you think he left his job to you?" she said with a sneer.

"I have taken it up as well as I can. To be frank with you, Mrs.
Borton, I know nothing about his job. I'm going along on blind chance,
and trying to keep a whole skin."

The old woman looked at me in amazement.

"Poor boy!" she exclaimed half-pityingly, half-admiringly. "You put
your hands to a job you know nothing about, when Henry Wilton couldn't
carry it with all his wits about him."

"I didn't do it," said I sullenly. "It has done itself. Everybody
insists that I'm Wilton. If I'm to have my throat slit for him I might
as well try to do his work. I wish to Heaven I knew what it was,
though."

Mother Borton leaned her head on her hand, and gazed on me thoughtfully