The Gentleman from Indiana - Page 96/212

The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed to

the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the field,

and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast. Then,

returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward through the

next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was a continuation

of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment. The track, raggedly

defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in a direction which

indicated that its terminus might be the switch where the empty cars had

stood last night, waiting for the one-o'clock freight. Though the fields

had been trampled down in many places by the searching parties, he felt

sure of the direction taken by the Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that

the searchers had mistaken the tracks he followed for those of earlier

parties in the hunt. On the embankment he saw a number of men, walking

west and examining the ground on each side, and a long line of people

following them out from town. He stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-

Roads in his hand and he knew it.

He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads, and

that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the Cross-

Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of his

knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the men near

him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive. They would

not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as a prisoner; such

a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also, they were not that

kind; they had been "looking for him" a long time, and their one idea was

to kill him.

And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe

believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one

thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and

whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality, there

was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed before

the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads "White-Cap" could have been laid upon

him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who knew him

well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an untitled

Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He was the only man

the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as "Marse" since he came

to Plattville, thirty years ago.

Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages, in

the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number they

had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of the

young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly in a

trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge up in his

breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long

retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a

serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness

that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their

long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out

the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over

to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the law could strike and the

innocent and the hotheaded be spared from suffering. He would wait; he

would lay his information before the sheriff; and Horner would go quietly

with a strong posse, for he would need a strong one. He began to retrace

his steps.