the hall? It is still in the basement now,
and if you are quiet, so quiet that the slipping patter of a rat's
foot on the floor comes to you, a sound as of a faint whining will
come to you also. There--now it comes again. No, it is not a dog; it
is a man--a man in his agony. Shall we open the great iron door, and
go into the cell room? Why, not even you, Miss Nancy--not even you,
who love tears so? You would not see much--only a man, with his coat
and vest off, an old man with a rather shaggy, ill-kept chin whisker
and not the cleanest shirt in the world--though it is plaited, and
once was a considerable garment. And the man wearing it, who lies
prostrate upon his face, once was a considerable man. But he is old
now, old and broken, and if he should look up, as you stepped in the
corridor before him, you would see a great face ripped and scarred by
fear and guilt, and eyes that look so piteously at you--eyes of a man
who cannot understand why the blow has fallen, surprised eyes with a
horror in them; and if he should speak, you will find a voice rough
and mushy with asthma. The heart that has throbbed so many nights in
fear and the breath that has been held for so many footsteps, at last
have turned their straining into disease. No--let's not go in. He
bade his daughter go, and would not see his wife, and they have sent
to the City for his son,--so let us not bother him, for to-morrow he
will be out on bail. But did you hear that fine, trembling, animal
whine--that cry that wrenched itself out of set teeth like a living
thing? Come on--let us go and find Jake, and if he is taking a drink,
don't blame him too much, Miss Nancy--how would you like to sleep in
that room across the corridor?

At nine o'clock the next morning two hundred men had signed the bond
the judge required, and Martin Culpepper shambled home with averted
eyes. They tried to carry him on their shoulders, thinking it would
cheer him up; and from the river wards of the town scores came to give
him their hands. But he shook himself away from them, like a great
whipped dog, and walked slowly up the hill, and turned into Lincoln
Avenue alone.

John Barclay heard the news of the colonel's trouble as he stepped
from his private car in the Sycamore Ridge yards that morning, and
Jane went to the Culpepper home without stopping at her own. That
afternoon, Molly Brownwell knocked at Barclay's office door in the
mill, and went in without waiting for him to open