e knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads,
and that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the
Cross-Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of
his knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the
men near him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive.
They would not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as
a prisoner; such a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also,
they were not that kind; they had been "looking for him" a long time,
and their one idea was to kill him.

And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe
believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one
thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and
whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality,
there was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed
before the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads "White-Cap" could have been
laid upon him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who
knew him well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an
untitled Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He
was the only man the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as
"Marse" since he came to Plattville, thirty years ago.

Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages,
in the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number
they had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of
the young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly
in a trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge
up in his breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more.
Though long retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all
his life a serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant
lawlessness that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the
people; their long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at
last and wipe out the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could
be held off over to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the
law could strike and the innocent and the hotheaded be spared from
suffering. He would wait; he would lay his information before the
sheriff; and Horner would go quietly with a strong posse, for he would
need a strong one. He began to retrace his steps.

The m