other'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.

Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at
the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat
behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with
many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now,
scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway
leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn
half-way to the top.

The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels of
reluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be pronounced upon
them, had kicked it in protest as they passed. It was as solemn and
gloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had gone
up it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treads
were worn to splinters; its b