When it became light enough I explored the old house, finding nothing but rags and old papers. There was no water in it and washing was out of the question. I gathered up an armful of the rags and papers, making a pallet of them by a window upstairs in a front room, where I could look out on the street. I sat down on the pallet and began to think things over. It was the first good chance since I had left my father. I heartily wished myself back with him. If this was adventure I wanted no more of it. I was done with it. It had brought me to this. Tired, hungry, bloody, afraid to go to sleep even if I could, lest I should be found and dragged off to jail and surely convicted. Smiler was dead. I had no ties to bind me to the road.

Yes, I would get out of this mess somehow and go back to my father. I was sorry for poor Smiler and would have stayed with him on the road, but now it was different. I felt no remorse for any of the things we had done. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t even think they were wrong. That phase of it never entered my mind.

Then I fell to thinking of Smiler’s tragic end; trying to puzzle it out: Why the woman shrieked, why the house remained so dark and silent, and why I wasn’t shot when I went to his assistance. There was no answer to it all. I felt easier in my mind now that I had decided to quit the road and go home, and longed for the night to come when I could leave my hiding place and wash the blood off my hands and face and get fresh clothes.

As the day wore on, feeling more secure, I stretched out on my bed of rags and paper and tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come to me. Later, in the afternoon, I removed my coat and shoes and managed to doze fitfully till evening. When it was dark enough to walk through the streets safely I left the house and made my way to a hot sulphur spring that gushed out of a hillside a mile away. There I stripped and scrubbed myself as best I could in the dark, and without soap. My clothes were stiff with dried blood. I threw the shirt and underwear away, put my handkerchief about my neck, and, buttoning my coat, started off in search of a store where I could get a new outfit.