The Long Lane's Turning. Hallie Erminie Rives
him to success. He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.
He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand. He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed by sullen scowl and sneering bravado—a concrete fact, perturbing and vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.
With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop, if it's a thousand miles!"
As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.
"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!"
CHAPTER II
A MAN AND A WOMAN
The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of feeling. She was nonplussed. She had entered for that last hour sharing intuitively the general belief that the prisoner would be acquitted: a belief, founded like that of the rest, upon her knowledge of his counsel. She had seen no straining for the spectacular in what some had been wont to call "Harry Sevier's pyrotechnics," and on past occasions on which she had heard him address a jury she had fallen wholly under the spell of that peculiar magnetism that swayed all alike. Aside from his continuous success in a calling with which her whole life had been associated—her father, Judge Beverly Allen, was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and his father had been Chancellor before him—with his brilliant way, his undenied leadership among his fellows, he had been to her a dominant personality. She had not lacked the masculine homage of a dozen others of their set, but Harry Sevier had always been the imminent figure in her thought, and it had needed no spoken word or promise between them to link her imagination wholly to a future in which he reigned supreme. So that his failure to-day had affected her strongly.
On the dusky court house steps she stopped to exchange greetings with a group who chatted there. They were full of the puzzle of Sevier's failure, or laughingly rueful at their own discomfiture, and she stopped but a moment before a negro coachman tucked her into a carriage. As he climbed lumberingly to his seat and gathered up the reins, a heavy, assured figure approached the curb. Cameron Craig was big and broad and in his strong and arrogant face lines of conflict had early etched themselves. He shook hands with her with a smile.
"I didn't know you were in town," she said, with a trace of aloofness.
"I'm here for only a day or two," he answered. "I had to talk a little politics with my attorney, Mr. Treadwell. It's his busy day, it seems, and as the mountain couldn't come to Mahomet, Mahomet came to the mountain. So here I am at the halls of justice. It's been an entertaining afternoon—the trial, I mean—but upon my word, I thought at first I had strayed into a convention of the Daughters of the Confederacy."
She smiled, but it came with difficulty. "Oh, court has become a social dissipation with us. It competes now with auction-bridge and the fox-trot."
"You tempt me to steal a purse or two," he said. "I love to hold the centre of the stage. The only thing I've been charged with stealing so far is an election, but one never knows to what heights he may rise. If I pick your pocket will you come to my trial?"
"If it were my pocket, I'd have to, wouldn't I?"
He bowed smilingly and turned away, as the coachman flicked the tossing manes with the tip of his whip. Looking over her shoulder, while the horses whirled her away, Echo saw his big frame swinging up the steps into the emptying building, every move expressive of virile strength and conscious power.
These were traits Cameron Craig had acquired through direct inheritance. His father had come penniless, to a small town in the adjoining state where, with calm assurance and without unnecessary delay, he had married the neighbourhood's prettiest girl and pre-empted a worn-out iron deposit with a tumble-down furnace, relic of a series of disgusted British owners. With the same certainty of judgment he had uncovered the lost ore, developed the property till it paid a miraculous dividend, and died. He had been a man of one idea—the "Works"—and had known and cared for nothing else. The son, however, with his father's force and will, had inherited, with less praiseworthy traits, a further ambition. The young Cameron Craig's first free act after his schooling ended was to dispose of the iron plant and to throw his money and his brain together into a group which now stood back of the great Public Services Corporation that held in control the vested interests of two states, exclusive of the railroads. At thirty he was a personality that loomed large in organised politics, and might be depended on to loom steadily larger to the end of the chapter.
As he entered the old building now he was thinking of the face of the girl he had just left, with its brilliant beauty and flashing youth.
"Why not?" he said to himself. "She has birth and breeding, but I can match them with things the world counts as high. I've never failed yet to get what I wanted—if I wanted it enough!" His thoughts recurred to the trial and to Harry Sevier. "Curious that nobody seemed to guess what the matter was—none but me. But I know what that look back of his eyes meant. The young fool! To have that gift—every thing right in his hand—and then to throw it away. For that's what it will come to, sure as fate, in the end!"
A hand fell upon his shoulder. It was Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, and he followed the latter into a private room and sat down. "Have you got the new committee list?" he asked, without preamble.
For answer the other took a closely written paper from his pocket and handed it over. "Senator Colby sent it down by his secretary this morning."
Craig drew his chair to the table and began to make pencilled changes and corrections, his hand moving swiftly and unhesitatingly. "There," he said, returning it. "That will be better. Let the senator have it back to-morrow." He sat a moment silent, his strong white fingers drumming on the table. "By the way, is this young Sevier likely to take a hand in the next campaign?"
"I don't know," replied the other. "I've always expected him to burst into politics some day. He has a curious hold on people—a wonderful magnetism. To-day's is the first jury case I've ever known him to lose. He as well as let it go by default. How he came to handle it so beats me!"
Craig might have enlightened him, but he did not.
"I've concluded we don't want him," he said. "He's uneven: the trial to-day proved that. Besides, he's too high-chinned—we can't depend on his type to obey orders. We are coming to a big fight and we want the docks clear. No overtures to him. We must cut out every man whose absolute footing we can't count on till the day of judgment."
The attorney lit a cigar and regarded its blue haze thoughtfully before he answered. "All right," he agreed. "I should have picked him for good material. But you're the doctor."
Meanwhile the carriage was whirling Echo Allen over the darkening asphalt. The tired night lay still, watching under dusky lids, the moon, a great blown magnolia, floating in the limpid sky. As the horses pounded on, the coachman's voice broke in upon her revery:
"Reck'n Marse Harry done got dat man