The Tempering. Charles Buck
of a rich family – and that's not enviable by half. And yet if I'd been a sheer rotter, I could scarcely have fared worse."
"If it wasn't consideration for you, at least it was for some one who should be important to you. As it is, your little girl isn't growing up under the shadow of a sensational divorce record."
The pale blue eyes of the Englishman softened abruptly, and the lips under the short-clipped moustache changed from their stiffness to the curvature of something like a smile. Into his expression came a lurking, half-shy ghost of winsomeness. "Yes, yes," he muttered, "the kiddie. God bless her little heart!"
After a moment, though, he drew back his shoulders with a jerk and spoke again in a harsher timbre.
"Anne has been fair enough with me about the child, though I'm bound to say I've been jolly well made to understand that it was only a chivalrous and undeserved sort of generosity. Well, the kiddie's almost twelve now, and before long she'll be a belle, too – poor, but related to all the first families."
Masters paused, and when he went on again it was still with the air of a repressed chafing of spirit.
"I dare say her mother will see to it that she doesn't repeat the mistake of the previous generation – marrying a man with only a splendid expectancy. Her heart will be schooled to demand the assured thing. That pointing with pride – a gesture which you Kentuckians so enjoy – well, with my little girl, it will all be done toward the distaff branch. There won't be much said about the wastrel father."
"Perhaps," suggested the other, "you are a little less than just."
"I dare say. She'll be a heart-breaker before long now – and listen, man" – Masters came a step nearer – "don't make any mistake about me either. When she's here, the bottle goes under lock and key. I play the game where she's concerned."
Colonel Wallifarro nodded slowly. "I know that, Larry," he hastily answered. "I know that. If the breach hadn't widened too far, I'd go as far as a man could to bring your family together again under one roof-tree."
"That's no use, of course," admitted Masters with a dead intonation. "Only remember that down here where I'm chained to my little job, life ain't so damned gay and sunny at best – and don't begrudge me my liquor."
CHAPTER XII
During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been denied bail, the boy back in the laurel-mantled hills smouldered with passionate resentment for what he believed to be a monstrous injustice. In his quest of education he sought refuge from the bitter brooding that had begun to mar his young features with its stamp of sullenness. Asa had killed men before, but it had been in that feud warfare which was sanctioned by his own conscience. Now he stood charged with a murder done for hire, the mercenary taking off of a man for whom he had no enmity save that of the abstract and political. Upon his kinsman's innocence the boy would have staked his life, and yet he must look helplessly on and see him thrown to the lions of public indignation.
Of Saul, he hardly thought at all. Saul was small-fry. The Commonwealth would treat him as such, but upon Asa it would wreak a surcharged anger, because to send Asa Gregory to the gallows would be to establish a direct link between the Governor who had pardoned him and mountain murder-lust.
Already the Secretary of State had been disposed of with a promptitude which, his friends asserted, savoured rather of the wolf pack than the courtroom. The verdict had been guilty, and his case was now pending on a motion for rehearing.
Already, too, a stenographer, who had been in the employ of the fugitive Governor, had been given a life sentence and had preferred accepting it without appeal to risking the graver alternative of the gallows.
As he lay in jail waiting until the slow grind of the law-mill should bring him into its hopper, Asa too recognized the extreme tenuousness of his chances.
But it was not until the wheat had been harvested and threshed in the rich bluegrass fields that the session of court was called to order, whose docket held for Asa Gregory the question of life and death.
That trial was to be at Georgetown, a graciously lying town about whose borders stretched estates, where a few acres were worth as much as a whole farm in the ragged and meagre hills. It was a town of kindly people, but just now of very indignant people, blinded by an unbalanced anger. It was not a hopeful place for a mountaineer with a notched gun who stood taxed with the murder from ambush of a governor.
Over the door of the brick court house stood an image of the blindfolded goddess. She was a weather-worn deity, corroded out of all resemblance to the spirit of eternal youthfulness which she should have exemplified, and Boone pressed his lips tight, as he entered with McCalloway, and noted that the scales which she held aloft were broken, but that the sword in the other hand was intact – and unsheathed.
At the stair head, in precaution against the electrically charged tension of the air, deputies passed outspread hands over the pockets and hips of each man who entered, in search for concealed weapons. About the semicircular table, fronting the bench and the prisoner's dock, sat the men of the press, sharpening their pencils and – waiting.
Under the faded portrait of Chief Justice Marshall a battery of windows let in the summer sun and the mellow voice of a distant negro, raised somewhere in a camp-meeting song.
Across a narrow alleyway were other windows in another building, and beyond them operators sat idling by newly installed telegraph keys. These men had no interest in the routine of the "running story." That was a matter to be handled by the regular telegraph offices. These newly strung wires would be dedicated to a single "flash" – when the climax came. Then the reporters would no longer be sitting at their crescent-shaped table. A few of them would stand framed in those courtroom windows under the portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, and as the words fell from the lips that held doom, their hands would rise, with one, two, three, or four fingers extended, as the case might warrant. In response to that prearranged signal, the special operators would open their keys and – if one finger had been shown – over their lines would run the single but sufficient word "death." Two fingers would mean "life imprisonment"; three, "acquittal"; four would indicate a "hung-jury." That time was still presumably far off, but the arrangement for it was complete.
In a matter of seconds after that grim pantomime occurred, foremen of printing crews standing by triple-decked presses in Louisville, in Cincinnati – in many other towns as well – would reach down and lift from the floor one of the several type metal forms prepared in advance to cover each possible exigency. A switch would be flipped. Back to the hot slag of the melting pots would go the other half-cylinders, and within three minutes papers, damp with ink and news, would be pouring from the maws of the presses into the hands of waiting boys.
To Boone these preparations were not yet comprehensible, but as McCalloway led him to a seat far forward he felt the tense atmosphere of place and moment.
He recognized, in those lines of opposing counsel, an array of notability. He picked out, with a glare of hatred, the bearded man whom the prosecution had brought as co-counsel, from another State, because of his great repute as a breaker-down of witnesses under cross-examination. Then his eyes lighted, as down the aisle came the full figure of Colonel Tom Wallifarro – to take its place among the attorneys for the defence. There was reassurance in his calmness and unexcited dignity.
And after interminable preliminaries, he heard the voice of the clerk droning from his docket, "The Commonwealth of Kentucky, against Asa Gregory; wilful murder," and after yet other delays the velvety direction from the bench, "Mr. Sheriff, bring the prisoner into court."
Asa's face, as he was led through the side door, was less bronzed than formerly, but his carriage was no less erect or confident. In a new suit of dark colour, with fresh linen instead of his hickory shirt, clean shaven and immaculately combed, the defendant was a transformed person, and if there remained any semblance of the highland desperado, it was to be found only in the catlike softness of his tread and the falcon alertness of his fine eyes. Pencils at the press table began their light scratching chorus – the reporters were writing their description of the accused.
Asa Gregory's line of defence had been