e
press table--"to have the full facts brought out."

"Will Your Honor," suggested Marcus, "instruct the sheriff to call Mr.
Deprayne?"

Garvin had looked up with an expression of surprise and then he had
smiled. "Mr. Sheriff," he instructed, "call Mr. Deprayne."

After that there had been a silence. While Garvin went through the
formality of waiting to hear the announcement "the witness does not
answer," he bent over the desk and once more exchanged compliments with
the reporters. These scribes had been sent to expose him and he was
bent on weaving about them the spell of his personality. Then it was
that I entered. From the door where for an instant I halted, I took in
the stained clapboard walls, carved over with crude initials; and the
dingy benches full of men in jeans and hodden gray. I caught my breath
as a dash of color struck my eyes and I recognized back of the gaunt
standing frame of Marcus, the seated figures of Weighborne and the lady
who had been so strangely important in my life. My cheeks flushed and
bracing back my shoulders, I walked down the center aisle, dust-stained,
with four days' growth of beard on my face, and one eye still
discolored. As I came, I was conscious of a murmur of astonishment
rising incredulously from the benches, and of an excited shuffling of
feet.

Called out of his conversation by this sound, Garvin raised his face,
still wreathed in its bland and smiling suavity--and our eyes met. For
an instant I think he did not recognize me. I must have been a rather
ludicrous and unprepossessing figure of a man, and possibly it was the
very obvious scars of battle on my disfigured countenance that first
told him my identity. At all events, the change that for an unguarded
interval crossed his florid face was startling.

The smile died instantaneously and he leaned forward to stare at me as
at some apparition. He quickly recovered himself, but the reporters
caught the tableau of his astonishment and put a paragraph into their
stories which was the preface to history-making in Adamson County.

I took my seat on the witness stand and raised my hand to be sworn, not
daring to meet the eyes of the woman who sat at the attorney's elbow,
though I felt her gaze upon me. Then I heard the cold modulation of
Marcus's voice.

"Mr. Deprayne, state your name, age and place of residence." I did so.

"Do you aver that an affidavit charging Judge Garvin with conspiracy to
murder and suppress evid