CHAPTER X.

THE pulses of life throbbed languidly in Chattalla. Sometimes there was hardly a creature to be seen upon the Square--and then again the noontide sunshine would rest only on the figure of a belated countryman, drunk overnight, lying in the safe shadow of the Temple of Justice, and sleeping off the effects of “bust head,” in the soft spring grass beneath the budding sycamore tree. Sometimes a wagon would rattle heavily across the stones; at long intervals the sound of chaffering would rise upon the air from “Jerusalem;” or perhaps the silence might be broken by the talk of a knot of gentlemen who brought chairs from the bank, and took up a position in the midst of the public pavement. If you should thread your way through this group, you would not overhear the discussion of news of the present day, local or foreign--you would catch such phrases as--“The enemy’s artillery opened the ball,”--or, “Then we executed a brilliant flank movement.” And you would go on realizing that all their interest lay in the past, and that they looked upon the future as only capable of furnishing a series of meagre and supplemental episodes.

It seemed to Estwicke afterward that one of these episodes, which roused Chattalla and diverted it momentarily from its occupation of contemplating its own history, was charged with the special purpose of effecting a breach between himself and General Vayne. It operated solely upon the peculiarities of their respective temperaments, for each had in the matter as slight concern as might be.

One morning Estwicke came down by rail from the barracks, and as he entered the lower cross-hall of the court-house he encountered General Vayne marching meditatively back and forth upon the brick-paved floor.

“I have been endeavoring, sir,” said General Vayne, as he offered his hand, “to drill some raw recruits of recollections. I am a witness, you know, in that Jartree suit against the life insurance company--shabby, shabby affair! Do you know, sir,” lowering his voice effectively, “that the pretext upon which they refuse to pay the loss is that Major Jartree died--by--his--own--hand!” Impressive pause. “They claim that the deed was done for the sake of securing the insurance money for his children!” Still more impressive pause. “That he _died_, sir, in the act of cheating and chousing. _My_ friend, Major Jartree!”

He drew himself up to his full height, twirling his mustache fiercely with his left hand, and looking frowningly intent--much as he did when he led a charge at Shiloh or Monterey.

There was an expression of embarrassment on Estwicke’s face; he was about to speak, but General Vayne, roused with affronted friendship, went swiftly on,--

“I am only to testify to the life-long integrity of Major Jartree--my limited knowledge of the minutiæ of this affair will permit me to go no further. But I am glad to enter the lists on any terms. I am glad to break a lance for those orphaned children! _Six_ of them, Captain Estwicke--six of those helpless children, all under fifteen years of age! No father--mother a confirmed invalid--and their half-brothers both family-men struggling along on little tid-bits of salaries. But”--with a change of voice, and waving the whole matter into a diminishing distance with his expressive left hand, “the effort on the part of the company to avoid the obligation is utterly futile. It will only be painful to Major Jartree’s friends and relatives to hear the puny, malicious attempts to tarnish his motives and character. _That_ can’t be done, sir, here in Chattalla, where the man was known and beloved and revered--_my_ friend, Major Jartree! It is impossible for them to procure any reputable, credible testimony!”

“Perhaps you are unaware,” said Estwicke, with a sudden hot flush, “that I am here to-day to testify in behalf of the insurance company.”

General Vayne fell back a step.

“Most certainly, sir, I was unaware of it,” he said, with slow emphasis. “And”--severely--“it seems to me you should before have stated the fact.”

Now, General Vayne was the father of a daughter--otherwise Estwicke would have sharply retorted that he had found it impossible to get in a word edgewise. He trembled with the effort at repression, but still stood confronting the elder gentleman, and intimating by his expectant eye that he anticipated something more definite in the way of an apology.

In General Vayne’s foolish, partisan indignation that the legal adversary of Major Jartree’s orphans had any witness at all, and that he himself had been thus unwittingly and ludicrously hob-nobbing with the enemy, he would have been glad to put Estwicke off with something less than the full honors of war. But the young man’s manner and attitude constrained him.

“In that case,” he resumed stiffly, “I beg to withdraw anything offensive I may have said concerning the character of the testimony which the insurance company can command.”

Here Estwicke should have dropped it.

“I did not have the opportunity,” he persisted, however, imperiously resolved to place himself exactly right upon the record, “to intimate earlier my slight connection with the affair. I was interested and surprised by what you were saying.”

And here General Vayne should have dropped it.

“And, if I may ask, what did I say to surprise you?” he demanded.

Combat was to Estwicke like the breath of his nostrils. Already restive under the many restraints imposed by the other’s seniority and paternity, his aggressive manner was only imperfectly tempered as he replied:--

“If you may ask, I may answer. I was surprised that so serious a doubt should be entertained that Major Jartree killed himself.”

“Doubt, sir! That he killed himself!” exclaimed General Vayne. “If I were warned of God in a vision I could not--I could not constrain myself to believe it! My friend”--his voice trembled--“Major Jartree!”

“And, Captain Estwicke,” he added, after a momentary pause, “it will be very difficult to make a jury believe _that_, in the face of Major Jartree’s character, which, fortunately, he left behind him, and which cannot be taken away even--from--a--dead--man.”

“I shall not attempt to make a jury believe it,” said Estwicke, irritated beyond bounds. “I shall only tell the jury, under oath, what I know.”

General Vayne looked at him gravely.

“I beg your pardon once more. I supposed that you were here to prove some slight collateral point. I had no idea that you intended to _try_ to make the jury believe that. Let me ask you, Captain Estwicke,” he continued, in a sudden tremor for the result of the case, “how you, a stranger, happen to be so fully informed about this matter?”

So much had been said of questionable intent that Estwicke fancied an implication in this, too.

“I should answer that question more appropriately from the witness stand,” he replied, altogether overtaken.

“Thank you!” cried General Vayne, fierily, “I am schooled!”

He was about to pass by, but Estwicke, already penitent, hastily added--

“I was at Bandusia Springs when he killed himself--I mean when he died.”

“I perceive in you, sir, a very formidable witness against the widow and the orphan,” said General Vayne, hotly.

“I assure you,” returned Estwicke, losing every vestige of self-control, “other people have some rights under the law--even an insurance company--and the law accords them my testimony, such as it is.”

“I wish you joy of your tilt in its behalf, and I have the honor to wish you also, sir, a very good morning.” And General Vayne passed swiftly through the door and strode off down the pavement to the gate, twirling his long, gray mustache, and touching his hat with a military salute to the men he met, who greeted him in like manner.

There were ten windows in the Circuit Court room, all of them furnished with great, green shutters, which stood, night and day, broadly flaring. This gave them from within a bare and unnaturally glaring aspect, and might have suggested, to a mind enervated and rendered morbid by the sophistication of shades and inside blinds, a painful resemblance to eyes lidless and lashless. In the summer-time, when the grimy and cobwebbed sashes were thrown up, the thick leaves of the sycamore close at hand, with here the flash of the dew and there the flutter of a wing, afforded a pretty make-shift for upholstery, but to-day only the budding branches touched the glass and occasionally rapped sharply upon it as if to call to order the assemblage within.

Besides the Bar, many of the unprofessional “quality” of Chattalla were present, and a considerable number of heavy country fellows from the outlying districts of the county, clad in brown jeans and stolidly eying the town folks, lounged on the benches or strolled aimlessly in and out of the room. Close to the wall, on the left, sat rows of the litigation-loving negroes, whose habit it is to frequent the trial of all causes, great or small. Admirers of oratory are these, and never a word is lost upon them. The jury held their heads attentively askew, for already the plaintiffs _prima facie_ case had been made out, and depositions were being read on the other side. Then Estwicke was called, and as he took his conspicuous place on the stand an expectant silence ensued.

The glare of the ten windows was full upon his expressive, irregular features, and his dark red hair, clipped close about his finely shaped head. His whiskers and mustache seemed to take a lighter tinge. There was a slight frown upon his face, and a grave, almost anxious, intentness in his brown eyes belied the cool, impassive manner with which he awaited the questions.

The first of these were comparatively unimportant, and elicited ready replies. They were put by the defendant’s senior counsel, a muscular, wiry, hatchet-faced man of the name of Kendricks, a stranger at this bar, and bearing in his garb and manner the stamp of a metropolis. He was a practitioner of some note in the city of Marston, and Temple Meredith had at first regarded with self-gratulation the fact of being associated with him in this case. It was calculated, Meredith thought, to impress the public with a sense of his increasing professional importance, since it could not be generally known that the influence of a kinsman, who was a director in the insurance company, had caused that corporation to secure also the young fellow’s valuable services. And in fact his services were valuable. He had done most of the drudgery in preparing the case, he had studied it carefully, drawn the papers, discovered important testimony, and armed himself to the teeth with precedent. But now that it had come on for trial, and was before the public, Kendricks had resumed his position as principal performer, and left the young man, ambitious of distinction, to saw away on the second fiddle with what complacence he might. Meredith maintained his habitual serenity of aspect, but, after the manner of such young shoots who desire to be century oaks in a fortnight, he felt ill-used. It never occurred to him that this state of silent obscurity was exactly the same which Kendricks had graced some twenty years before.

Presently a sudden break occurred in the examination.

“State anything that Major Jartree may have said to you on the subject of suicide.”

The witness hesitated, turned his hat in his hand, and glanced down at it, conscious of General Vayne’s fierce eyes fixed upon him--conscious of no others. A flush rose into his face--and then he looked up. He was sensible of an angry contempt for himself that he had sought to shirk any man’s gaze, that there should be any man whose displeasure he deprecated--and deprecated for a selfish reason. And in this instant he caught the expression of faces that had a far more unnerving effect--that smote upon his heart. The dead man’s two sons sat before him--shabby-genteel young drudges, with joyless, troubled eyes, in which he read the terrible anxiety that possesses men who hold character dear, when character is called in question. And he remembered, too, the widow and the six orphans whose little all was in jeopardy.

He chafed under the sense of these influences. “Have I a conscience?” he asked himself. “Do I realize the obligations of an oath?”

In the effort to sustain his equilibrium he was unaware how much of the indifference, which he sought to foster in his mind and heart, was expressed in his manner as he replied, “Major Jartree often spoke to me of suicide. He alluded to it as ‘the solution of a problem.’”

General Vayne threw himself back impatiently in his chair, which creaked beneath the shifting of his heavy weight. There was a cruel, blanching dismay in the faces of the dead man’s sons. They looked at each other in painful doubt and bewilderment, and then they looked back in increasing surprise at the witness.

This to the crowd seemed almost conclusive. The depositions of the physicians which had been read proved only that Major Jartree had for some time, under advice, used morphine, and had taken an overdose. From their showing, it might have been an accident. This testimony seemed to indicate a deliberate intention.

Estwicke was requested to give the particulars, so far as his memory might serve, of all that Major Jartree had said alluding to suicide, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place.

And as he complied, the impression he created was one which his slightest friend might regret. His glance was both hard and careless. Now and then he turned, with an idle gesture, his soft hat which he held folded in his hand. His manner seemed the exponent of a callous nature--the very tones of his voice indicated a peculiarly frivolous insensibility to the painful and even tragic elements involved in the recital. For it began to be very evident that a bankrupt, in broken health, in great depression of spirit, in frantic anxiety for his children’s future and the support of an invalid wife, the dead man had sacrificed his honesty, his conscience, his life, for a pittance, and sacrificed it in vain. He had talked too much in his loneliness and his sorrows to a friendly young stranger whom he had met at the “Springs,” whither his sons had sent him for a few weeks to recuperate his health and divert his mind--they felt every day even yet the hard pinching of the economies which that extravagance had entailed upon them. Though Estwicke gave every detail so lightly, as he recounted the scenes, they seemed to pass visibly before the jury. Even the least imaginative among them had a vivid mental picture of the long, mysterious, wooded Cumberland spurs, and the grim gray cliff projected against a red sunset sky, and heard the dead man’s shrill tones, breaking into the still evening air, as he rose, and with uplifted hand protested,--“A man’s life is his own, Captain Estwicke,--shall he not say when it shall end!” And again there was a conversation in the freshness of the morning as they sat in the observatory, which hung over the precipice and quivered and shuddered with the wind, and here he had calculated the depth below, and argued with his companion whether it were certain death to fall. And once they drank together the sparkling chalybeate water that bubbled out from a cleft in a crag. “I wish you health, my young friend,” he had said. “You are at the entrance of the great stage. I hope you have a fine _rôle_ to play, and a good stock company of friends for support, and a great ovation and glorification awaiting you. I am but a supernumerary at best, and nearer the exit than you think. Instead of this health-giving water I should drink some deadly drug. And then you would see with what grace I can make my bow to an audience which has not troubled itself overmuch about me, and about which I shall trouble myself no more.”

General Vayne rose and walked heavily out of the room. He went down the stairs, leaning ponderously on the balustrade, and joined Mr. Ridgeway who chanced to be aimlessly strolling about the porch.

“Sir,” said General Vayne, facing round upon his friend in the flickering shadow of the leafless sycamore boughs, “sir, the quality of sympathy is the one quality which lifts the human animal above the beasts that perish. The man who lacks it, lacks his soul.”

After a pause he continued impressively. “It is a quality, sir, which ennobles a beggar and adorns a prince.”

Then he fell suddenly from his rounded periods into an inconsequent heap, so to speak, of indignation.

“I--tell--you--what--it--is--sir,”--he said in that effective diminuendo--“this belated invasion--this post-mortem invasion, as one might call it, is”--

He checked himself; he would not speak disparagingly of a man behind his back,--not even of the post-mortem invader, his own familiar home-made Yankee who invaded his native soil.

For a time the two elderly gentlemen sat on the front steps in silence. Then General Vayne rose and paced up and down the brick-floored hall, struggling with an inclination to return to the court-room and hear the testimony that was so repugnant to him. Finally the impulse prevailed. When he went back he found that Estwicke was under cross-examination. This was very skilfully conducted, but elicited nothing of value, except that he had heard other men who had never committed suicide say many like things, and that he had considered these of no special import until after Major Jartree’s death. There were no contradictions, no admissions, no involutions. He was the ideal witness, bold, succinct, and as transparent as crystal. As he went down from the stand, Meredith, with the _camaraderie_ of youth, indicated by a gesture of invitation, a vacant chair at his side. Estwicke hesitated; then, saying to himself that he would not truckle, he would not seem to avoid them, he sat down by the defendant’s lawyers, although he thought as he did so that this was an overt act of perfect accord which he might well spare himself, and he felt as if he and they were conspirators in some dark deed against the widow and the orphans.

The plaintiff’s rebutting testimony was now to be taken, and General Vayne was the first witness called.

“Will you state,” said the counsel, “what was Major Jartree’s character for integrity.”

“Sir,” exclaimed General Vayne, while the tears rushed to his enthusiastic eyes, and he made an agitated gesture as if he would clasp his missing right hand--clasping only the empty air, “I would answer for his integrity with my life--with--my--life!”

There was throughout the room an electric current of painful sympathy. The jury were surprised, thrilled, touched. The hatchet-faced Kendricks was on his feet in an instant with an objection.

“Could I say more--or less?” cried the witness, suddenly, forestalling the plaintiff’s counsel, “knowing him as I did--_my_ friend, Major Jartree! Only the voice of the stranger is raised against him!”

All eyes were turned toward Estwicke. He was a-tingle in every fibre, his face grew hot and scarlet, the veins in his temples were blue and swollen; he made a movement as if he were about to rise.

“Steady--steady!” said the placid and debonair Meredith in an undertone, laying a staying hand on Estwicke’s shoulder.

The contentious Kendricks was in his element. “I appeal to your Honor,” he vociferated, “to protect my witness”--Estwicke gasped--“to protect my witness against these aspersions intended to prejudice the jury against the conclusive testimony he has given.”

“Aspersions!” exclaimed General Vayne, leaning forward suddenly toward the plaintiff’s lawyers. “_Did_ he say _aspersions_?”

There was a jostling rush forward to obtain a better view of the actors in the little drama, and the constantly contracting crowd was shaded off by a line of black faces enlivened by glittering ivories and the whites of astonished rolling eyes. A clamor of voices had arisen, and above all dominated the sheriff’s stentorian “Silence in court!”

“I’ll commit somebody presently,” said the judge impersonally. He had a wooden face, an impassive manner, and a brier-root pipe which he smoked imperturbably throughout the proceedings. He was a man of few words but of prompt action; at the sound of his inexpressive voice the tumult was stilled instantly.

“Will your Honor be so good as to admonish the witness that reflections on those who preceded him are not evidence and are inadmissible.”

“The witness must comport himself with all due regard to this court and counsel,” said the judge. Then the examination was resumed.

“What was Major Jartree’s habit of conversation?”

“He often spoke figuratively. He might have been easily misunderstood by a man of different mental calibre--a literal-minded man.”

“Will your Honor instruct the witness to confine himself to the necessary replies,” exclaimed Kendricks, again on his feet. “The witness does not answer questions. He is only seeking to utilize Captain Estwicke’s testimony, which he has heard, to make an argument. I see that we ought to have had all these witnesses put under the rule.”

“Too late, now,” interpolated the judge, dryly.

“Instead of answering questions,” pursued Kendricks, “the witness is trying to persuade the jury that all Major Jartree said to Captain Estwicke were merely flowers of rhetoric which”--with a fine sneer--“his limited mental capacity prevented him from comprehending.”

“Counsel may sit down,” said the impassive judge, who had weathered many a storm like this.

Kendricks sat down in--paradoxically--a towering rage, and the plaintiffs lawyer proceeded.

“What was Major Jartree’s temperament?”

The witness looked inquiringly.

“State whether he was kindly disposed, or otherwise, and anything you may know of his character.”

“Kind, sir? He had the kindest heart that ever beat! He was humane, and gentle, and generous! He was imbued with a fine char-r-ity.” Here the witness demonstrated his own char-r-ity by pausing impressively to scowl at Estwicke. “He saw men, not as they were, but as they sought to be. He revered his fellow-creature. He beheld in man the majesty of his Maker’s image!”

“I object,” cried Kendricks hastily. For there was a change ominous to his client’s interests in the expression of the jurymen. They had all known and been “mighty sorry” for Major Jartree, who was an amiable but useless old gentleman, and nobody’s enemy but his own. They recognized him in all this, but somehow he loomed before them in impressive proportions as General Vayne lent them his moral magnifying glass. “If the court please, this is not evidence,” persisted Kendricks.

“Keep strictly to the point,” said the judge.

“I will, your Honor,” returned the witness earnestly.

“Was he a religious man?”

“He was a sincere and humble Christian,” said General Vayne conclusively--in his own way he was a pious man himself.

“Can you state anything which would intimate his possible horror of the crime of suicide?”

“Sir, he entertained a deep reverence for the sanctity of life. He took ample cognizance of that stupendous right to exist which dignifies the meanest worm of the earth. I once heard him say to a grandchild who was torturing an insect--‘My dear, the beetle is your brother. Spare him!’”

He repeated this with a noble gesture of intercession and a fine oratorical effect. He fixed his magnetic eyes on the jury who were subtly agitated by an illogical responsive fervor, and then with a sudden wild burst of indignation he exclaimed:--

“And they ask us to believe that this man, of all men, held himself, whom God had so nobly endowed, as slighter than the beetle--and took his life and falsified his character, so graciously won, to cheat an insurance company. It is monstrous--monstrous! _My_ friend! Major Jartree!”

“Stop! _Stop!_ STOP!” Kendricks had roared in a steadily increasing crescendo, but throughout these vociferations General Vayne had kept steadily on, regarding them only as a strategic movement of the enemy designed to divert his attention.

“Your Honor, I insist--I _demand_ that you admonish this witness as to his duty, and require him to conform to it.”

“The witness _must_ answer questions, and say nothing further,” said the judge emphatically.

The witness turned his flushed, enthusiastic face toward the plaintiff’s lawyers as an invitation to come again. They were taking heart of grace. It is not always safe to trust the appearance of a jury, but those twelve good and lawful men were beginning to assume the aspect of a row of intent and eager partisans. An influence more potent than law or right reason swayed them. The witness had fast hold of their heart-strings, and their pulses quickened under his touch.

“What was the character of Major Jartree’s mind?”

“He possessed a highly cultivated understanding, sir. His power of discrimination between right and wrong was as solid as the heart of that tree, and as perfectly adjusted as the hair-trigger of your pistol, sir.”

“What was his habit in the matter of prudence or rashness?”

“He was cool and deliberate. He possessed remarkable foresight. I will instance the fact that he foresaw, from the beginning, the result of the Late War”--which on the day of the surrender had been a great surprise to General Vayne.

“You are not here to instance facts,” exclaimed Kendricks pettishly.

To this General Vayne paid no manner of attention, but went on eagerly.

“If he were capable of such a deed, for such a purpose--the mere supposition is abhorrent--he could but have perceived that it would of necessity defeat itself.”

“I desire to ask of your Honor,” said Kendricks, once more on his feet, and utterly losing control of his temper, “whether throughout the testimony of this witness I am to be subjected to the ignominy of this bravado, and my client’s interests to a flagrant injustice? It is plain that the witness does not desire to give evidence. He only seeks to insinuate prejudice and to foster misapprehension in the minds of the jury.”

General Vayne rose slowly from the chair. The movement at such a moment was unprecedented and unexpected, and there was a breathless pause of surprise and doubt. He was so pre-eminently a calm man that he never found it necessary to subject his intentions to the scrutiny and question imperative with men of impulse. His gesture was appropriately deliberate as he reached up to the judge’s desk and grasped the heavy glass inkstand that stood there. The next moment it was hurled wildly at the head of the defendant’s counsel, impartially distributing its contents on the irreproachable shirt-bosoms of the “quality” of Chattalla, and endangering in its defective aim the row of negroes, high up on the benches, who dodged as one man. The wind of its flight, as it crashed harmless against the wall, nearly took off a darkey’s ear, and impressed with his peril, and holding the threatened member in his cautious hand, he vociferated--“I tell ye now, dey’d better leff de ole gen’al alone!”

Kendricks had--instinctively, perhaps--thrust his arm behind him. It was a significant motion. The next moment something steely and sinister gleamed in his hand. But quick as he was, he was hardly quick enough. The pistol was cocked, but not levelled, when General Vayne rushed upon him. There was a swift, muscular movement of that dextrous left arm, and the learned counsel, hit fair and full between the eyes, was sprawling upon the floor, the revolver discharging in his fall, and the bullet skipping lightsomely through the little that was left of the crowd. An eager curiosity as to the subsequent proceedings rallied the audience, and it was re-enforced, in a solid phalanx, by the Grand Jury, that had been in session in the opposite room, and was roused from its absorptions by the exhilarating note of the pistol.

The judge sat astounded upon the bench. “Why, bless my soul, General!” he exclaimed weakly. And then once more, “Bless my soul!”

He gave, however, a sign of return to judicial consciousness in imposing a fine of fifty dollars upon General Vayne for contempt of court; and to the lovers of sensation it seemed that the Grand Jury was providentially close at hand, for it went back to its den and indicted the stranger for carrying concealed weapons.

“Mr. Sheriff,” said the judge, “adjourn the court till two o’clock.”

“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” quavered Mr. Sheriff, greatly distraught. “The honorable Circuit Court stands adjourned till two of the clock!”

General Vayne’s friends had hustled him out of the room. He was in the deepest humiliation. The want of dignity in his demonstration smote upon him sorely. That _he_ should have so far forgotten himself! That _he_ should lift his hand against his fellow-man--without a pistol in it!

When his colleague had left the room the defendant’s junior counsel walked to the other door and waylaid a plethoric, eager, unwieldy old man who was hastening after General Vayne.

“Let me detain you a moment,” said Meredith politely. “Mr. Ridgeway, I think?”

The old gentleman, facing about, solemnly acknowledged it.

“This is a terrible affair, Mr. Ridgeway, and for General Vayne’s own sake it must not be allowed to stand as it is. As you are a friend of his, you must help me to get an apology from him.”

The old gentleman seemed on the verge of apoplexy. He became scarlet in the face as he stood unsteadily before his junior. He spluttered and gasped in his excitement; his eager words struggled for precedence, and ran over each other--“Anapology?--’napology, sir? An apology for being shot at!”

“The pistol was discharged when Mr. Kendricks was knocked down,” said Meredith. “Do you think it is fair to conclude that he would have fired it?”

“Wha--what was he doing with it, then?” spluttered the old gentleman sarcastically.

“Don’t you admit the possibility that he drew it to intimidate General Vayne--he could not stand still and be struck, and he could not strike a maimed man. You don’t reflect, Mr. Ridgeway, that General Vayne will occupy the intolerable position of taking advantage of that circumstance. Of course Mr. Kendricks can do nothing but submit to the indignity.”

The old gentleman tugged meditatively at his tuft of beard, as if it had some cerebral connection and he sought thus to stimulate mental activity.

As the lawyer was accustomed to present only one side of a question, and Mr. Ridgeway to see only one side, neither took any notice of Mr. Kendricks’s “intolerable position,” one ignoring it from intention and the other from fatuity. And at this moment, that gentleman, walking the narrow bounds of his room at the hotel, was absorbed in agonizing deprecation of public opinion, which he knew would not take into account a hurled inkstand in a case in which a pistol had been drawn on an unarmed and maimed man.

In a sudden flutter of anxiety, Mr. Ridgeway acceded, with apoplectic haste, to Meredith’s suggestion, and the ill-assorted couple crossed the square to one of the lawyer’s offices, where General Vayne sat with a friend, who, upon recognizing Meredith, rose and left the room, marvelling greatly as to his mission.

“General Vayne,” said Meredith, who had previously met the elder gentleman, “I do not come from Mr. Kendricks; understand that. But I think some disinterested person should say to you, both on his account and your own, that you mistook altogether his intention. If you had been calm, you would have realized that his manner of urging his objection was a mere matter of course; it was his duty to his client’s interest to seek to injure your testimony.”

“Calm, sir, calm!” exclaimed General Vayne, his bald head purple. “I assure you, sir, I was as calm as I am at this moment.”

“It is absurd, General,” said Mr. Ridgeway, eagerly, “to attribute to a sane man an intention of seriously reflecting upon you. Your friends cannot sufficiently regret that under this delusion you should have permitted yourself to insult a gentleman”--

“And a gentleman in the discharge of a purely professional duty,” added the wily young diplomatist.

General Vayne sprang up and began to walk back and forth the length of the apartment, nervously pulling his mustache.

“And in the presence of a motley throng,” said the elder peacemaker.

“Bringing a court of justice into contempt,” said the lawyer.

“And offering a spectacle of insubordination to the men of your command, who hold you as an exemplar,” pursued Mr. Ridgeway.

The unsuspecting subject of all this craft groaned aloud.

“Inflicting a public humiliation, and personal injury, and pecuniary loss upon a man who only sought to do his duty to his client,” said Meredith.

The simple-hearted gentleman paused in his rapid striding to and fro, and with that agitated gesture, as if he would clasp his missing hand, he turned credulous eyes first on one of the tacticians, then on the other.

“And a stranger in the town!” exclaimed Mr. Ridgeway, capping the climax.

“I--I--will write to him,” declared General Vayne, altogether overwhelmed. He turned to the table, and placed pen, ink, and paper with that adroit left hand. “I--I--am afraid I have been very hasty--very wrong--I will write.” Then, suddenly, “No, I will not write. The affront was offered in the presence of a large assemblage”--this was his way of dignifying that motley little crowd; “I will apologize publicly, sir, publicly.”

He looked about him wildly for his hat, caught it up, and strode with his buoyant step into the sunshine, twirling his gray mustache, and glancing keenly about for the object of his search.

The other two had risen at the same instant, and as they were about to follow him out of the door, the young lawyer, equally surprised and elated by the readiness with which peace had been patched up, attempted to exchange a leer of congratulation with his red-faced coadjutor. The demonstration was received with an expression of blank inquiry.

“Why, God bless me!” thought young America, feeling much like a child caught making faces, and mastering the situation with an effort, “here’s another!”

Kendricks had already emerged from his room at the hotel. It had required some nerve to face Chattalla again, alive, as he knew it must be, with its enjoyment of the “fight free for all,” but he did not want the “cursed little town” to say he was hiding, and with this view he was strolling listlessly about the public square. There General Vayne met him. Admiring Chattalla could only see from a distance the dumb show of an oratorical apology, and catch, now and then, the echo of a rotund period. It seemed, however, that the thing was very handsomely done, and handsomely received, too; for this unexpected turn of affairs had solved the lawyer’s dilemma, which had offered the equally impracticable alternatives of challenging a one-armed man, or submitting to the ignominy of a blow. His relief gave his manner an unwonted geniality, and as they parted, Chattalla, looking after them, said that this was no doubt the best solution, although the whole affair, from the inkstand to the apology, was painfully “irregular.” Then knots of men fell to talking about the propriety of blows, and apologies, under “The Code.”

It was a long day to Estwicke, and fraught with many anxieties, but late in the afternoon, as he pressed with the crowd out of the court-house yard, they all seemed merged in the canvassing of his position in regard to General Vayne, and how far it might affect the future. He had inwardly resented the allusion to himself in the court-room, and he was not a man to tamely submit to an affront. But how was it possible to openly resent it from one old enough to be his father, whose hospitality he had often accepted, and with whose family he was on terms of cordial friendship? Then, too, impartially viewed, the ground of offence was untenable. He had been called a stranger, which was true, and it had been intimated that he might have misunderstood General Vayne’s friend. Ought he, in justice to himself, to allow this to bar all further intercourse between them; to go to General Vayne’s house no more; to relinquish, in effect, his hope of winning the woman he loved, and every dear prospect of the future?

The question was summarily settled. As he crossed the square he passed General Vayne. The elder gentleman returned his bow with a courtesy as fierce and as punctilious as if they faced each other at twelve paces. Estwicke went on, his blood on fire, swearing a mighty oath that he would take what cognizance he could of his own dignity, and that, whatever sacrifices might be involved, he would not go again to the house of a man who had offered him a public affront, confirming its deliberate intention by his manner afterward, which intimated a feeling approaching enmity.