To his astonishment Joe had, for answer, a mirthless, almost derisive, laugh—a laugh that was barked.
"So far we've stood for that, and what have we gained?" Boone's mood, which had been all day seething like the imprisoned fire-flood of a volcano, burst now in lava-flow through the ruptured crater of repression. "Asa abided by the law seven years and more ago—didn't he? Well, he's rotted in a cell ever since! Saul Fulton played with the law and the law played with him and paid him Judas money and made him rich! You say they'll follow me. Then, before God in heaven, I'll lead them to a cleansing by fire! When we finish the job, those murderers and perjurers will be done for once and for all!"
"And you," the deputy sheriff reminded him soberly, "you'll be plumb ruint."
"I'm ruined now."
It was not a handsome room in which the two men stood, and Boone had taken it with a provident eye to its cheapness, but it was in a hotel stone-built in the times of long ago, and from the days of Henry Clay and John C. Breckinridge to the time when Goebel died there history had had birth between those heavy walls.
In the cheaply furnished bedroom whose paper was faded, the observant eyes of Joe Gregory had caught one detail that struck his simple interest, even in the surge of weightier tides.
A massive silver photograph frame lay face downward on the table as though it had been inadvertently over-turned.
Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the mysterious words, "I'm ruined now," filled out with meaning as a sagging and formless sail rounds into shape under the livening breath of wind.
He, too, had in those few moments seen an idol at least totter on its pedestal. He had been a hill boy famishing for advancement, and before his eyes Boone Wellver, distantly his relative, had been an exemplar. Now Boone was in some unaccountable vortex and talking wildly of inciting men who needed to be calmed. Into Joe Gregory's mind flashed an instinct of resentment against Anne Masters, whom he had often seen there in the hills. In some fashion, he divined, she was to blame for this situation.