Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War/The Cause of the Difficulty

THE CAUSE OF THE DIFFICULTYIf you are a reader of the newspapers you saw the account they printed the other day in regard to the murder of a young woman by Toog Parmalee, in the neighborhood of "Hatcher's Ford." You could n't have missed it. The night editors dished it up as a great sensation, spreading it out under startling black headlines.
The account said that two young ladies—sisters—were walking along the road, when they saw Toog Parmalee come out of the bushes with a pistol in his hand. He had been courting one of them for two or three years, and when she now saw him coming she turned and fled in the opposite direction, while the other sister, not knowing what to think or how to act, stood still. In this way she probably saved her own life, for Toog passed her by in pursuit of the flying girl, who was overtaken and shot in cold blood. These ​harrowing details were spread out with great particularity in the newspapers, and the verdict, made up by those who furnished the details, was that Parmalee was stark crazy.
The only fact given in the account was that Parmalee had killed his sweetheart, and this could have been made clear in much less space than a column of reading mat

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