The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leadership as animates the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who smokes the pipe of sane counsel.
Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the reach of his blow.
Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must combat and overcome.
"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a man, "I've been as deep down in hell today as a man can go." Then he started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim Bartleton of Marlin Town.
"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."
Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little" Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.
The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby. Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He sat upright in his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land."
The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room.
"Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name."