"My baby!" was all she said; and Bobbie, white, trembling and palpitating, cried in a weird, high voice: "I've found my mother!"
Then Jordan Morse understood. The hot blood was tearing to his ear drums. The blind boy he had persecuted and tortured, the boy he had made suffer, was his own son. That wonderful quality in the man, the fatherhood within him, rose in surging insistence. Instant remorse attacked him, as an oak is attacked by fierce winter storms. He saw the boy's angelic face grow the color of death; saw Molly the Merry gather him up. Then a stab of jealousy cut his heart like a knife. He bent over with set jaws.
"Give him to me," he cried. "He's mine!"
Molly surrendered the child with reluctance, but terror and fright were depicted upon Bobbie's face.
"Jinnie! Lafe! Peggy!" he screamed. "He'll hurt me! The black man's goin' to kill me! Jinnie, pretty Jinnie----"
The passionate voice grew faint and ceased. Then the loving little heart burst in the boyish bosom, and Bobbie's angels bore away his young soul to another world where blindness is not,--where his uplifted being would understand that the stars he'd loved,--the stars he'd gathered in his small, unseeing head,--were but a reflection of those in God's firmament. With one final quiver he straightened out in his father's arms and was silent. All his loves and sorrows were in the eternal yesterdays, and to-day had delivered him into the charge of Lafe's angels.
Jinnie was crying hysterically, and her father's dying curse upon her uncle leapt into her mind. She was clinging to the cobbler, and both had moved to Peg, where the woman sat as if turned to stone.
Not a person in the courtroom stirred. In consternation the jury sat in their chairs like graven images, taking in the freshly wrought tragedy with tense expressions. The judge, too, leaned forward in his chair, watching.
Jordan Morse faced the room, with its silent, observant crowd, pressing to his breast the dead body of his child. Then he turned to Lafe, white, twitching, and suffering.
"I shot Maudlin Bates," he said, haltingly; then turning to the jury he continued: "The cobbler's an innocent man----"
A menacing groan fell from a hundred lips at his words.
He deliberately took from his hip pocket a revolver, lifted the weapon and finished: "I'm--I'm sorry, Jinnie, I'm----"
Then came the sharp, short bark of the gun, and the bullet found a path to his brain. He staggered, frantically clutching the slender body of Bobbie closer--and toppled over.