“Do you think, sir, that Mr. Harshaw had no foundation for his threat,” said an elderly granger, who leaned against a pillar,—“no foundation for this charge against Judge Gwinnan?”
“Gwinnan may have ruled against him a time or two,” said Kinsard. “That’s about the size of it.”
He had a pedigree as long as his favorite colt’s, but this was the way he talked.
“It is a gross slander, then; it implies a stealage, or taking a bribe, or some malfeasance in office,—the judicial office,” said one of the by-standers.
“It was very shabby in Harshaw to say it; then, thinking Gwinnan had never heard of it, to go fawning up, pretending to be so mighty friendly,” rejoined another.
Kinsard’s black eyes turned slowly from one speaker to the other.
“If I had been Judge Gwinnan, I would have killed him for it,” he said, with his cigar held tightly between his fingers. “I would have spilt his brains, not his blood; and I would have had some scientific man to find the precise section of the brain structure which ideated that theory, and I would have had it comminuted, and vaporized, and transmuted into nothingness.”
He spoke with calmness, as if these things were done every day for the vengeful in Tennessee.
The granger took off his spectacles suddenly. He wanted to see this extraordinary young man, who he had an idea was too dangerous to be at large.
The others looked at him with a less serious air. They had before heard him talk.