Then Lone Stacy answered gruffly, but there was an unsteadiness of feeling under his laconic reply.
"I've done showed ye how wrathful I air. I'm tolable old—but I reckon I kin still l'arn."
Even when Kinnard Towers sat a prisoner in the courtroom which he had dominated, and heard Sam Carlyle, seeking to save his own neck by turning traitor, tell the lurid story of all his iniquities, an unbending doggedness characterized his attitude. As his eyes dwelt on the henchman who was swearing away his life, they burned so scornfully that the witness twisted and fidgeted and glanced sidewise with hangdog shame.
When the jury trooped in and stood lined solemnly before the bench, he gazed out of the window where the hills were beginning to soften their slaty monotone with a hint of tender green. He did not need to hear them respond to the droning inquiries of the clerk, because he had read the verdict in their faces long before.
But when they had, for greater security, removed him to the Louisville jail and had put him in that row of cells reserved for those whose lives are forfeit to the law, it is doubtful whether that masklike inexpressiveness truly mirrored an inward phlegm.
There was an electric lamp fixed against the iron bars of the death corridor, turned inward like a spot-light of shame which was never dimmed either day or night—and there was a warden who paced the place, never leaving him unwatched—and Kinnard Towers had lived in places where eagles breed and where the air is wild and bites the lungs with its tang of freedom.
It was June again—June full-bosomed and tuneful with the over-spilling melody of birds. Over the tall peaks arched a sky of such a pure and colorful blue that it, too, seemed to sing—and the little clouds that drifted placidly along were like the lazy sails of pleasure craft, floating in high currents. Along the dimmest and most distant ridges lay a violet mist that was all ash-of-dreams—but near at hand, whether on the upper levels of high hills or down in the shadowed recesses, where the small waters trickled, everything was color—color, bloom and song.
The rhododendron, which the mountaineer calls laurel, was abloom. The laurel, which is known in hill parlance as ivy, was gay with pink-hearted blossom. The mountain magnolia flaunted its great petals of waxen while and the wild rose nodded its frail face everywhere.