"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Mr. Higginbotham's Castrophe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

Any place will answer."

Being thus importuned, the traveller- who was as ill looking a
fellow as one would desire to meet in a solitary piece of woods-
appeared to hesitate a little, as if he was either searching his
memory for news, or weighing the expediency of telling it. At last,
mounting on the step of the cart, he whispered in the ear of
Dominicus, though he might have shouted aloud and no other mortal
would have heard him.

"I do remember one little trifle of news," said he. "Old Mr.
Higginbotham, of Kimballton, was murdered in his orchard, at eight
o'clock last night, by an Irishman and a nigger. They strung him up to
the branch of a St. Michael's pear-tree, where nobody would find him
till the morning."

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 pedlar 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 pigtail, 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 pedlar had discovered in