mn-faced, his weapon still in his hand, turned to gaze
at the haggard man who rose slowly, turning away from that which he now
saw.

"It was the act of committing a felony," said Dan Cowles slowly. "It was
to save human life. He resisted arrest, and he was armed. It was a
felony."

But when old Ephraim Adamson turned his gray face to that of the officer
of the law, in his sad eyes there was no resentment. He held out his
hand.

"Dan," said he, "thank God you done it! Thank God it's over!"

CHAPTER XXI

A TRUE BILL

Now it was nine o'clock of the Monday morning. The grand jury was in
session thus early, and it had thus early brought in a true bill against
one Dieudonne Lane for murder in the first degree. The session of the
jury had just begun. None of the jury knew of these late events at the
house of Aurora Lane.

In his office Judge Henderson was pacing up and down all that morning.
He had failed in every attempt to stop the progress of the law. He could
not on Sunday afternoon reach by telephone or otherwise the men he
wished to see; on Sunday night had seen this horror; and now, early on
Monday, there was no way by which even he could arrest the procedure of
the grand jury, made up of men who lived here, and who before this had
made up their minds on the bill which Slattery, state's attorney,
zealous as they, had rushed through at a late session with his own
clerks on Sunday night after he had ended his Sabbath motor ride to an
adjoining town.

Fate conspired against Judge Henderson and his shrewd plan for delay
which was to have left him secure in his ambition and saved in his own
conceit. These things now seemed shrunk, faded, unimportant.

He had not slept at all that night. Before him now swept such a panorama
as it seemed to him would never let him sleep again. He was indeed
facing now the crisis of his life--a crisis not in his material affairs
alone, but a crisis of his moral nature. He had learned in one swift
lesson what others sometimes learn more deliberately--that the world is
not for the use of any one man alone, but for the use of all men who
dwell in it. It is the world of human beings who are partners in its
use. They stand alike on its soil, they fight there for the same end.
They are brothers, even though savage brothers, after all.

And among these are fathers, too. It was his own son who lay in yonder
jail. Now at last some thought, a new, stirring and compelling emotion
cam