Out of A Labyrinth by Lawrence Lynch

It was a June day; breezy, yet somewhat too warm. The slow going old passenger train on the slow going mail route, that shall be nameless in these chronicles, seemed in less of a hurry than usual, and I, stretched lazily across two seats, with my left arm in a sling, was beginning to yield to the prevailing atmosphere of stupidity, when we rumbled up to a village station, and took on board a single passenger. I was returning from a fruitless mission; and had stepped on board the eastward-bound train in anything but an enviable frame of mind; and no wonder! I, who prided myself upon my skill in my profession; I, who was counted by my chief the “best detective on the force, sir,”-had started, less than a week before, for a little farming settlement in one of the interior States, confident of my ability to unravel soon, and easily, a knotty problem. I had taken every precaution to conceal my identity, and believed myself in a fair way to unveil the mystery that had brought grief and consternation into the midst of those comfortable, easy-going farmers; and I had been spotted at the very outset! I had been first warned, in a gentlemanly but anonymous fashion, to leave the neighborhood, and then, because I did not avail myself of the very first opportunity to decamp, had been shot from behind a hedge! And this is how it happened: Groveland, so called, doubtless, because of the total absence of anything bearing closer resemblance to a grove than the thrifty orchards scattered here and there, is a thriving township, not a town. Its inhabitants reside in the midst of their own farms, and, save the farm buildings, the low, rambling, sometimes picturesque farm houses, or newer, more imposing, “improved” and often exquisitely ugly, white painted dwellings; the blacksmith shop, operated by a thrifty farmer and his hard-fisted sons; the post-office, kept in one corner of the “front room” by a sour-visaged old farmer’s wife; and the district school-house, then in a state of quiescence, -town institutions there were none in Groveland.