he must throw his dice and let circumstances ordain with what
faces upward they would roll.

He stood before Victor McCalloway's fireplace and raised his hands.

"Men," he began without haste or excitement, "I've listened to all of
you and I've had little to say. I sat with Asa in the court that tried
him. I've visited him not once but often in the jail where Saul Fulton's
perjury has put him and kept him. I've besieged the Governor to plead
for him, and I yield to no man in loyalty to Asa Gregory. Now I claim
the right to be heard."

Anne crouched, listening with inheld breath, while the voices below
stairs dwindled from clamour to attention. She tried to visualize the
speaker, but because the whole world had receded from familiarity he,
too, became vague and hard to picture.

But as Boone talked, she knew that his voice and words and the heart
which was meeting, full-front, an issue he had been in danger of
deserting, were making magic, and along her own scalp went the creep
that is the ultimate test of drama. Inconsequentially she fretted
because she could not see his eyes. His auditors, though, could see the
eyes and respond to their hypnotic fires--respond though the text he
taught was hard to stomach.

He was winning them against their prejudices, and so skilfully had he
carried them step by step that they were saved from anything like full
realization of self-reversal, which means loss of self-esteem. If for
the hireling shot from the laurel they had no other response than
retaliation in kind, they were only rising to the bait of a lawless and
unimaginative enemy. It was better, he asserted, that the efforts to
murder him succeed than that they should draw the life essence out of
every principle in which his adherents had supported him.

Anne said to herself that Boone had carried the night, but Boone knew
otherwise.

A handful of men keyed for violence now accorded him calm attentiveness.
They could even laugh, on occasion, but he was thinking of the closed
door of McCalloway's room. He had need to grapple them to his leadership
more strongly yet, for when he opened that door they would no longer
laugh.

Now he drew a deep breath.

"These things that I am saying to you, I say not only with a full
knowledge of all that you men have told me but with a knowledge of a
harder thing to bear." He paused, and then he told them bluntly:

"'Little' Jim Bartleton lies dead behind that door. He was killed
tonig