It began to be very apparent to the spectators, the bar, the prisoner, the attorney-general, and the sheriff, that Judge Gwinnan had the fixed purpose of sitting there without adjournment until the requisite competent dozen jurors should be secured. It was already late, long past the usual hour for supper, and although the lawyers and the crowd, who could withdraw and refresh themselves as they wished, might approve of this ascetic determination neither to eat nor to sleep until the jury was achieved, the sheriff, his deputy absent, felt it a hardship. He was a bulky fellow, accustomed to locomotion only on horseback. He had taken much exercise to-day on foot, a sort of official Diogenes,—searching for a mythical unattained man of an exigent mental and moral pattern,—with not even a tub as a haven to which he might have the poor privilege of retiring. When he next darted out with a sort of unwieldy agility into the hall, which was lighted by a swinging lamp, the wick turned too high and the chimney emitting flames tipped with smoke, he was not easily to be withstood. He seized upon a man leaning idly against the wall, his hands in his pockets, whom he had not seen before to-day. “Ye air the very feller I’m a-lookin’ fur!” he cried, magnifying the accident into a feat of intention.
Peter Rood drew back further against the wall, with a shocked expression on his swarthy face and in his glittering black eyes. “I can’t!” he cried. “Lemme go!”
“Why can’t ye?” demanded the sheriff.
“I ain’t well,” protested Rood, more calmly.
“Shucks!” the officer incredulously commented. “Ef all I hev hearn o’ that sort to-day war true, thar ain’t a hearty, whoppin’ big man in Cherokee County but what’s got every disease from the chicken pip ter the yaller fever. Come on, Pete, an’ quit foolin’.”
Under the strong coercion of the law administered by a sheriff who wanted his supper, Rood could but go.
Despite his rapacious interest in all that concerned the tragedy, he had hitherto held aloof from the court-house; he had withdrawn himself even from the streets, fearing to meet the sheriff. Seeing the great yellow lights in the windows, each flaring in the rainy night like some many-faceted topaz, he had fancied that the trial must be well under way, for no gossip had come to him in his hiding-place of the difficulty of securing a jury. He could no longer resist his curiosity. He strode at his leisurely gait up the steps, meaning merely to glance within, when the sheriff issued upon him.
As he came with the officer into the room, Mink scanned him angrily, leaned forward, and whispered sharply to the lawyer. Rood was trembling in every fibre; the fixed gaze of all the crowd seemed to pierce him; his great eyes turned with a fluctuating, meaningless stare from one official to the other.
He was a freeholder, not a householder. He had expressed no opinion as to the guilt of the prisoner. Had he formed none? He had not thought about it. He was challenged by the defense on the score of personal enmity toward the prisoner, the peremptory challenges being exhausted. As he was otherwise eligible he was put upon his voir dire.
Harshaw looked steadily at him for a moment, his red lips curling, sitting with his arms folded across his broad chest. Mink’s bright, keen face close behind him was expectant, already triumphant. His hand was on the back of his counsel’s chair.