On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm
and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of
dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to
a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the
stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light
a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, who
had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the
plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times
to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as
machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold
anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him. Something danced
before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had
taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised
it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched
forward to the sidewalk.

Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand,
Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his
way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down.
It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near
the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been
Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wife to the farm
and the beech forest.

But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did
not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it some way," he
thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding
in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech
forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often
sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. "I'll rest a