t. Then followed
long moments of waiting, in which Robert Fairchild's eyes went to the
floor, in which he strove to avoid the gaze of every one in the crowded
court room. He knew what they were thinking, that his father had been
a murderer, and that he--well, that he was blood of his father's blood.
He could hear the buzzing of tongues, the shifting of the court room on
the unstable chairs, and he knew fingers were pointing at him. For
once in his life he had not the strength to face his fellow men. A
quarter of an hour--a knock on the door--then the six men clattered
forth again, to hand a piece of paper to the coroner. And he,
adjusting his glasses, turned to the court room and read:

"We, the jury, find that the deceased came to his death from injuries
sustained at the hands of Thornton Fairchild, in or about the month of
June, 1892."

That was all, but it was enough. The stain had been placed; the thing
which the white-haired man who had sat by a window back in Indianapolis
had feared all his life had come after death. And it was as though he
were living again in the body of his son, his son who now stood beside
the big form of Harry, striving to force his eyes upward and finally
succeeding,--standing there facing the morbid, staring crowd as they
turned and jostled that they might look at him, the son of a murderer!

How long it lasted he did not, could not know. The moments were dazed,
bleared things which consisted to him only of a succession of eyes, of
persons who pointed him out, who seemed to edge away from him as they
passed him. It seemed hours before the court room cleared. Then, the
attorney at one side, Harry at the other, he started out of the court
room.

The crowd still was on the street, milling, circling, dividing into
little groups to discuss the verdict. Through them shot scrambling
forms of newsboys, seeking, in imitation of metropolitan methods, to
enhance the circulation of the _Bugle_ with an edition of a paper
already hours old. Dazedly, simply for the sake of something to take
his mind from the throngs and the gossip about him, Fairchild bought a
paper and stepped to the light to glance over the first page. There,
emblazoned under the "Extra" heading, was the story of the finding of
the skeleton in the Blue Poppy mine, while beside it was something
which caused Robert Fairchild to almost forget, for the moment, the
horrors of the ordeal which he was undergoing. It was a par