Part 16 (1/2)

”No, sir, only that he's swearin' to save his own neck from the rope--an' thet's a right pithy reason, I reckon.”

Yet all the while that he was making his steep, uphill fight, Asa was feeling a secret disquiet growing to an obsession within him. He could not forget that some one upon whose rea.s.surance he had leaned had been banished from that place where his enemies were bent upon his undoing.

He felt as if the red lantern had been quenched on a dangerous crossing--and the psychology of the thing gnawed at his overtried nerves.

Boone's freckled face and wide blue eyes had seemed to stand for serenity, where all else was hectic and fevered.

To Asa, that intangible yet tranquillizing support had meant what the spider meant to Bruce, and now it had been taken from him.

The bearded attorney who had destroyed defendant after defendant was battering at him, with the ma.s.sed artillery of vindictive and unremitting aggressiveness.

For a long while Asa fenced warily--coolly, remembering that to slip the curb upon his temper meant ruin, but as a.s.sault followed a.s.sault, through hours, his senses began to reel, his surety began to weaken, and his eyes began to see red.

The attorney who was scourging him with the whips of law saw the first break in his armour and bored into it, with ever-increasing vindictiveness.

Into Asa's mind flashed a picture of the cabin back home, of the wife suffering an agony of anxiety; of the baby whom he might never again see. He seemed groping with his gaze for the steadying eyes of the boy, who was no longer there--whom he desperately needed.

”Asa's gittin' right mad,” whispered one mountaineer to another. ”I'd hate ter encounter him, right now, in a highway--an' be an enemy of his'n.”

But the bearded attorney, who was not in the highway, only badgered and heckled him with a more calculating precision and, as he slowly shook the witness out of self-restraint into madness, he was himself deliberately circling from his place at the Commonwealth's table to a position directly back of the jury box.

Now, having achieved that vantage point, he watched the prisoner's face grow sombre and furious as the prisoner's head lowered like that of a charging bull.

One more question he put--a question of deliberate insult, which brought an admonitory rap of the Judge's gavel; then he thrust out an accusing finger which pointed straight into the defendant's face.

”Look at him now, gentlemen of the jury,” he dramatically thundered.

”Look at those mismated eyes and determine whether or not this is the man who blocked the state-house doorway--the a.s.sa.s.sin who laid low a governor!”

Gazing from their seats in the jury-box, the men of the venire saw before them and facing them a prisoner whose two fine, calm eyes had been transfigured and mismated by pa.s.sion--whose pupils were marked by some puzzling phenomenon of rabid anger that seemed to leave them no longer twins.

It was much later that the panel came in from the room where it had wrangled all night, but that had been the decisive moment. Three or four reporters detached themselves from their places at the press table and stood close to the windows.

Then the foreman spoke, for in Kentucky the jury not only decides guilt but fixes the penalty, and the reporters raised one finger each--It meant that the verdict was death.

CHAPTER XIV

As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away from a finished chapter.

The boy stared ahead now with a gla.s.sy misery, and the eyes and ears, usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for service.

Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.

Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies, and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the cabin where the ”granny folks” dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.

McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the face of his youthful protege began to lighten. Boone was as yet too young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut--and dual. Asa's ”woman” must have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be wrung from its stinted productivity--and he must put behind him that ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.

One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house, knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.