character and motives of accuser and accused. But the
gods have eternity at their disposal, and their mills are run by
unerring, self-administering laws, while the courts are sometimes
harassed with a heavy docket that must be got through with and laws are
made and administered by erring mortals. When they are overcrowded,
there is inevitably, now and then, a victim.

Hence old Tom Abercrombie, chained to a cot, staring up at the roof of a
tent, oppressed with a terrible loneliness; thinking of a long double
cabin in a mountain-girded valley, far over the Tennessee line, where he
and Molly had lived forty years; of the cornfields in a creek bottom, of
children and of grandchildren, of widely scattered neighbours and
friends.

Next day he was put to driving four mules hitched to a road scraper.
Chains clanking, he had to climb as best he could into the iron seat.
The humiliation of striped clothes he was spared; that barbarity had
been done away with by law. He wore his black trousers, a blue shirt,
and his broad-brimmed hat. Once on the seat no one passing along the
road could see his shackles, but as if they were heated red-hot these
symbols of shame burned into his flesh.

In the road ahead and in the road behind Negro pickers and shovellers
toiled away, watched over by guards with shotguns. He saw the eyes of
these guards turn constantly toward him. "You want to watch that old
devil," Simmons had warned them. "He's dangerous."

The days that followed were all alike: days of toil that began before
sunrise, continued through blazing middays, and ended after sundown.
Always, before and behind, the gang picked and shovelled, always the
eyes of the guards were turning toward him. Always against the horizon
the mountains, flecked at midday with clouds and shadows, beckoned him
like a mirage.

Sometimes from the top of a hill, under his broad hat, he studied the
lay of the land. In his mind he mapped out the water courses and the
stretches of woodland that led with least open country to the mountains.
Sometimes at night he dreamed of a double cabin in a cool
mountain-girded valley.

"You want to watch him," warned Simmons again and again.

Once Molly came to see him. Simmons himself, at the guard tent,
questioned her roughly, then shrugged his shoulders and let her pass.
Throughout the interview, though, he sat over there by the guard tent,
his eyes always on the two of them; and at his side, but never looking
up