The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that something out of the ordinary had happened.

We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations, “He did, eh!”

“Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena’s feelings.

Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s say-in’?”

“Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!”

Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s Mills, you know—that’s right near Cold Harbor and—the Wilderness,” she said, obviously making talk.

“That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What is it, Emmeline?”

“Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to know—he says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the barn.”

Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.

“He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him. Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.”

“They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed, shaking his long gray beard with wrath.

He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.

“They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o’ my money—an’ they ain’t sent me him at all! There I went, at my age, all through the Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up from a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York an’ Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this very day—an’ here it ain’t him at all! I’ll have the law on ‘em though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!”

Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage with everything and everybody.

“If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.”

“Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars—I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a thousand—if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n double, I’d ’a’ paid it. What I wanted was my boy! It ain’t so much their cheatin’ me I mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. But to think of Alvy—my boy—after all the trouble I took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers—to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, ............