very fury of his desperate, eleventh hour
effort to assert his right to the center of that stage--the right
of long-established precedent--yet even those two long files of
old men gasped aloud their dismay at his temerity when Old Jerry
thrust his way forward and planted himself for a second time
squarely in the great man's path.

Half way from the office doors to the yellow-wheeled buckboard, in the
very middle of the walk, he stood and stretched out a tentatively
restraining hand, just as mild-voiced, white-haired Dave had done
years before. And in his high, cracked falsetto, that was tremulously
bitter for all that he struggled to lift it to a plane of easy
jocularity, he exclaimed:

"Now see here, Jedge; what's the meanin' of all this? You ain't turned
kidnapper, hev you?"

There came a heavy hush, while the Judge stood and stared down at the
thin face trying to smile confidently up at him--a hush that endured
while Judge Maynard swept him from head to foot with one shriveling
glare and then walked around him without a word--walked around him
just as he might have walked around the hitching post at the roadside,
or any other object that chanced to bar his way! And this time Old
Jerry's face twitched and went whiter even than before.

Nobody laughed, not even after the yellow-wheeled buckboard with its
strangely assorted pair of passengers had sped from sight toward the
county seat and a legal adjustment of still another mortgage on the
Bolton acres. Not a word was spoken until Old Jerry, too, had
clambered silently into his own creaking buggy and crawled slowly off
up the hill, with a squealing accompaniment of ungreased axles.

And even then, in the argument which began with a swirl of conjecture
and ended, hours later, in a torrent of bitter personalities farthest
of all from the first question under consideration, they avoided a
mention of that regrettable incident just as for some time after its
occurrence they avoided each other's eyes, as if they felt somehow
that theirs was, after all, the real guilt.

Upon one point alone did they agree; they were unanimous that if Young
Denny Bolton's bearing that morning--the angle at which he held his
chin, and the huge cut that adorned it, and his causeless mirth--was
not entirely damning, it was at least suspicious enough to require
more than a little explanation. But that verdict, too, was none other
than the very one which the Judge had already planned for the