defendant after defendant was
battering at him, with the massed artillery of vindictive and
unremitting aggressiveness.

For a long while Asa fenced warily--coolly, remembering that to slip the
curb upon his temper meant ruin, but as assault followed assault,
through hours, his senses began to reel, his surety began to weaken, and
his eyes began to see red.

The attorney who was scourging him with the whips of law saw the first
break in his armour and bored into it, with ever-increasing
vindictiveness.

Into Asa's mind flashed a picture of the cabin back home, of the wife
suffering an agony of anxiety; of the baby whom he might never again
see. He seemed groping with his gaze for the steadying eyes of the boy,
who was no longer there--whom he desperately needed.

"Asa's gittin' right mad," whispered one mountaineer to another. "I'd
hate ter encounter him, right now, in a highway--an' be an enemy of
his'n."

But the bearded attorney, who was not in the highway, only badgered and
heckled him with a more calculating precision and, as he slowly shook
the witness out of self-restraint into madness, he was himself
deliberately circling from his place at the Commonwealth's table to a
position directly back of the jury box.

Now, having achieved that vantage point, he watched the prisoner's face
grow sombre and furious as the prisoner's head lowered like that of a
charging bull.

One more question he put--a question of deliberate insult, which brought
an admonitory rap of the Judge's gavel; then he thrust out an accusing
finger which pointed straight into the defendant's face.

"Look at him now, gentlemen of the jury," he dramatically thundered.
"Look at those mismated eyes and determine whether or not this is the
man who blocked the state-house doorway--the assassin who laid low a
governor!"

Gazing from their seats in the jury-box, the men of the venire saw
before them and facing them a prisoner whose two fine, calm eyes had
been transfigured and mismated by passion--whose pupils were marked by
some puzzling phenomenon of rabid anger that seemed to leave them no
longer twins.

It was much later that the panel came in from the room where it had
wrangled all night, but that had been the decisive moment. Three or four
reporters detached themselves from their places at the press table and
stood close to the windows.

Then the foreman spoke, for in Kentucky the jury not only decides guilt
but fixes the penalty, and