g him into its hopper, Asa too recognized the extreme tenuousness of
his chances.

But it was not until the wheat had been harvested and threshed in the
rich bluegrass fields that the session of court was called to order,
whose docket held for Asa Gregory the question of life and death.

That trial was to be at Georgetown, a graciously lying town about whose
borders stretched estates, where a few acres were worth as much as a
whole farm in the ragged and meagre hills. It was a town of kindly
people, but just now of very indignant people, blinded by an unbalanced
anger. It was not a hopeful place for a mountaineer with a notched gun
who stood taxed with the murder from ambush of a governor.

Over the door of the brick court house stood an image of the blindfolded
goddess. She was a weather-worn deity, corroded out of all resemblance
to the spirit of eternal youthfulness which she should have exemplified,
and Boone pressed his lips tight, as he entered with McCalloway, and
noted that the scales which she held aloft were broken, but that the
sword in the other hand was intact--and unsheathed.

At the stair head, in precaution against the electrically charged
tension of the air, deputies passed outspread hands over the pockets and
hips of each man who entered, in search for concealed weapons. About the
semicircular table, fronting the bench and the prisoner's dock, sat the
men of the press, sharpening their pencils and--waiting.

Under the faded portrait of Chief Justice Marshall a battery of windows
let in the summer sun and the mellow voice of a distant negro, raised
somewhere in a camp-meeting song.

Across a narrow alleyway were other windows in another building, and
beyond them operators sat idling by newly installed telegraph keys.
These men had no interest in the routine of the "running story." That
was a matter to be handled by the regular telegraph offices. These
newly strung wires would be dedicated to a single "flash"--when the
climax came. Then the reporters would no longer be sitting at their
crescent-shaped table. A few of them would stand framed in those
courtroom windows under the portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, and as
the words fell from the lips that held doom, their hands would rise,
with one, two, three, or four fingers extended, as the case might
warrant. In response to that prearranged signal, the special operators
would open their keys and--if one finger had been shown--over their
lines woul