Part 40 (2/2)

”Hammer says it will take two or three days,” Joe told her, ”but I don't see what they can do to make it string out that long. I could tell them all about it in ten minutes. So we mustn't put our hopes too high on Monday, Mother.”

”I'll beseech the Lord all day tomorrow, son, to open their ears that they may hear,” said she solemnly. ”And when the time comes to speak tell it all, Joe, tell it all!”

”Yes, Mother, when the time comes,” said he gently.

”Tell 'em all Isom said to you, son,” she charged.

”Don't you worry over that now, Mother.”

She felt that her son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly.

”Well, I'll be rackin' off home,” she said.

”If you stop at the colonel's to rest a while, Mother--and I wish you would, for you're all tired out--you might hand this book back to Miss Price. She loaned it to me. Tell her I read it long ago, and I'd have sent it back before now, only I thought she might come after it herself some time.”

His mother turned to him, a curious expression in her face.

”Don't she come any more, Joe?”

”She's been busy with other things, I guess,” said he.

”Maybe,” she allowed, with a feeling of resentment against the book on account of its cold, unfriendly owner.

She had almost reached the corridor gate when Joe called after her.

”No, don't tell her that,” he requested. ”Don't tell her anything. Just hand it back, please, Mother.”

”Whatever you say, Joe.”

Joe heard the steel gate close after her and the sheriff's voice loud above his mother's as they went toward the door.

Loyal as he was to his mother, the thought of her went out with her, and in her place stood the slender figure of youth, her lips ”like a thread of scarlet.” One day more to wait for the event of his justification and vindication, or at least the beginning of it, thought Joe.

Ah, if Alice only would come to lighten the interval!

CHAPTER XV

THE STATE _VS._ NEWBOLT

The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and close around the building.

In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of these spreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a giant tree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place.

It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fine old days before the war.

There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one of the logs of the original court-house, built in that square more than sixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for the murder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summer days, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirring incidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut in the tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recall memories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.

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