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smoke was still in there, it would have got out. And if there hadn’t been any smoke in that box, Granby wouldn’t have given himself away. And that was a week ago. How did you know there was going to be any smoke in that box?’
    ‘I didn’t,’ Stevens said. He said it quickly, brightly, cheerfully, almost happily, almost beaming. ‘I didn’t. I waited as long as I could before I put the smoke in there. Just before you all came into the room, I filled that box full of pipe smoke and shut it up. But I didn’t know. I was a lot scareder than Granby Dodge. But it was all right. That smoke stayed in that box almost an hour.’

Monk
     

I will have to try to tell about Monk. I mean, actually try—a deliberate attempt to bridge the inconsistencies in his brief and sordid and unoriginal history, to make something out of it, not only with the nebulous tools of supposition and inference and invention, but to employ these nebulous tools upon the nebulous and inexplicable material which he left behind him. Because it is only in literature that the paradoxical and even mutually negativing anecdotes in the history of a human heart can be juxtaposed and annealed by art into verisimilitude and credibility.
    He was a moron, perhaps even a cretin; he should never have gone to the penitentiary at all. But at the time of his trial we had a young District Attorney who had his eye on Congress, and Monk had no people and no money and not even a lawyer, because I don’t believe he ever understood why he should need a lawyer or even what a lawyer was, and so the Court appointed a lawyer for him, a young man just admitted to the bar, who probably knew but little more about the practical functioning of criminal law than Monk did, who perhaps pleaded Monk guilty at the direction of the Court or maybe forgot that he could have entered a plea of mental incompetence, since Monk did not for one moment deny that he had killed the deceased. They could not keep him from affirming or even reiterating it, in fact. He was neither confessing nor boasting. It was almost as though he were trying to make a speech, to the people who held him beside the body until the deputy got there, to the deputy and to the jailor and to the other prisoners—the casual niggers picked up for gambling or vagrancy or for selling whiskey in alleys—and to the J. P. who arraigned him and the lawyer appointed by the Court, and to the Court and the jury. Even an hour after the killing he could not seem to remember where it had happened; he could not even remember the man whom he affirmed that he had killed; he named as his victim (this on suggestion, prompting) several men who were alive, and even one who was present in the J. P.’s office at the time. But he never denied that he had killed somebody. It was not insistence; it was just a serene reiteration of the fact in that voice bright, eager, and sympathetic while he tried to make his speech, trying to tell them something of which they could make neither head nor tail and to which they refused to listen. He was not confessing, not trying to establish grounds for lenience in order to escape what he had done. It was as though he were trying to postulate something, using this opportunity to bridge the hitherto abyss between himself and the living world, the world of living men, the ponderable and travailing earth—as witness the curious speech which he made on the gallows five years later.
    But then, he never should have lived, either. He came—emerged: whether he was born there or not, no one knew—from the pine hill country in the eastern part of our county: a country which twenty-five years ago (Monk was about twenty-five) was without roads almost and where even the sheriff of the county did not go—a country impenetrable and almost uncultivated and populated by a clannish people who owed allegiance to no one and no thing and whom outsiders never saw until a few years back when good roads and automobiles penetrated