An Error in Chemistry

It was Joel Flint himself who telephoned the sheriff that he had killed his wife. And when the sheriff and his deputy reached the scene, drove the twenty-odd miles into the remote back-country region where old Wesley Pritchel lived, Joel Flint himself met them at the door and asked them in. He was the foreigner, the outlander, the Yankee who had come into our county two years ago as the operator of a pitch—a lighted booth where a roulette wheel spun against a bank of nickel-plated pistols and razors and watches and harmonicas—in a travelling street carnival and who when the carnival departed had remained, and two months later was married to Pritchel’s only living child: the dim-witted spinster of almost forty, who until then had shared her irascible and violent-tempered father’s almost hermit-existence on the good though small farm which he owned. But even after the marriage, old Pritchel still seemed to draw the line against his son-in-law. He built a new small house for them two miles from his own, where the daughter was presently raising chickens for the market. According to rumor old Pritchel, who hardly ever went anywhere anyway, had never once entered the new house, so that he saw even this last remaining child only once a week. This would be when she and her husband would drive each Sunday in the second-hand truck in which the son-in-law marketed the chickens, to take Sunday dinner with old Pritchel in the old house where Pritchel now did his [end ts 1] own cooking and housework. In fact, the neighbors said the only reason he allowed the sonin-law to enter his house even then was so that his daughter could prepare him a decent hot meal once a week. So for the next two years, occasionally in Jefferson, the county seat, but more frequently in the little cross-roads hamlet near his home, the sonin-law would be seen and heard too. He1 was a man in the middle forties,