According to the smug dictum of all self-righteous society, his duty was plain: to inform the waiting police that an escaped convict lurked within a stone’s throw. What matter if he thereby involved Uncle Eb as an accomplice? What though he tore the heart of a girl and threw a boy back into a living tomb? A convict was a convict, duly sentenced by judicial authority, and those who connived to defeat that authority must suffer the consequences. And the girl—what is a girl’s grief to the Law?
Such was the code of Respectability. Confronting it was the code of the hills, which this old man was instinctively obeying; the code of natural justice, far more ancient and human than the chain-clanking machinery of legislature and court and prison: Stand by your own! On either side of Douglas Hampton they towered, stark and hard as the two great walls of the Traps; and he must either swing on in the Traps current or turn and fight against it.
To a worshipper of codes, the choice might have come hard. To this man it was hardly even a matter for choice. He had his own instinctive code, and backbone enough to follow it through. And now he gave no thought to the beliefs and traditions of either the great world without or the little world within the mountain bowl. He saw only the desperate face of Steve, heard only the lad’s vehement denial of guilt. And he spent no time in pondering over his course.
Not more than five seconds passed between Uncle Eb’s whisper and his first move. He nodded, slid the empty cans into separate pockets, and turned doorward.
“Thanks. I’ll try ’em both out,” he said. “Pay you the next time I see you. That all right?”
“Sure, sure, that’s all right—any time, son, any time. Mebbe I’ll be drivin’ down your way to-morrer, or anyways the next day—I might go after the honey to-morrer. Want to set in an’ eat ’fore ye go? I ain’t much good of a cook, an’ Marthy an’ Becky ain’t to home to-day—they went a-visitin’—but I got to fix up sumpthin’ for myself, an’——”
“No, I’ll be going. Had my lunch just a little while ago.”
“Wal, g’by. Which way ye goin’—up back? Wal, say, do sumpthin’ for me. Throw down a jag o’ hay to the hoss when ye go ’long. Much ’bliged.”
Douglas nearly grinned at the old man’s adroitness in thus openly turning him toward the barn. But he kept his face expressionless and, with a nod both to Uncle Eb and to the silent man-hunters, loafed toward the exit. Then one of the sinister pair moved and spoke.
“Wait a minute,” he commanded bruskly. “What you carryin’ that gun for? This ain’t huntin’ season.”