It is a short story.
The setting is the rural society of the American South.
An authoritarian father has effectively driven his two sons from the property: the younger because he had demanded the partition of the land, the elder because he can no longer tolerate his father.
While the younger lives as a hermit, the elder goes to live with a cousin.
The father dies, seemingly killed by a horse, and the judge—the executor of the estate—is also murdered.
The prosecutor manages, through his dialectical skill and careful use of words, to drive the real culprit, the cousin, to confess.
The contrivance hinges precisely on smoke, which the prosecutor conceals in one of the judge's boxes and whose presence at the crime scene corners the culprit, who turns out to be a heavy smoker.
The plot purports to be that of a detective story, but in truth the real subject of the tale lies in the barrenness and harshness of the rural world and of family relations, shaped beneath the desire to possess the land.
In contrast with this brutality and a squalid everyday existence unfolds the elegant phrasing of the prosecutor:

he had graduated from Harvard...
capable of spending whole afternoons in the company of men squatting against the walls of country stores, speaking to them in their own tongue.
He called them his moments of leisure

.
The rural world is somehow manipulated by language, by the intellectual who speaks well and knows how to devise tricks and traps for naive country folk.
The story's style, particularly its sentence structure, develops in a highly complex fashion, and is therefore difficult to read.

Smoke