"My friend," he said, "I have raised my hat to one or two colossal freaks in the past, but henceforth I shall come into your exalted presence with bare-headed humilitude. However, my boy, don't think that I'm flirting with the penitentiary for the sake of your dazzling future, or for any of your pipe dreams. I'm doing it," he arose, and added softly, "I'm doing it for the fun of the damn thing. Good night, Mr. Genius!"
Long, long afterwards, Brent continued to sit in the back-tilted chair, gloomily staring through the window which framed his dim vision of the world. Later, somewhere on the other side of the house, the moon came up; and far out across the country a dog howled. Yet, by another hour, when that disk of lifeless white had floated higher in the sky, the trees framed by his window dropped their robe of mourning for a more soothing green and silver.
"I don't reckon it's such a somber old world, after all," he stood up, stretching;—then went to bed, and slept.
But, across the hall, Dale had not slept. Excited, boyishly happy to have escaped the consequences of his madness, he had tossed throughout the night; building up castles of greatness equal to those of his beloved Clay and Lincoln.
Now a robin piped its three first waking notes, and the mountaineer's eyes opened wide. The interior of the room was beginning to be touched with gray, and he sprang up, throwing back the eastern shutters and gazing on that first faint flush of dawn which stirs within man's breast a feeling of the Omnipotent. With lips apart, he watched the coming of delicate layers of salmon, and saw them merge to a soft and satiny rose. Vermillion now touched the highlights, as though some unseen brush, wet from a palette below the horizon, had reached up and made a bold stroke across this varying canvas. More slowly followed blue—and then a bluer blue.
His thoughts, coloring with the sky, were whimsically curious. A day was coming! It would come and go, and never in all eternity come again—would this day! It was coming: to some, bringing ungrudging pleasure, sweet happiness; to others, unsparing misery, bitter despair! Before days were, it had been arranged that this one should appear—it had been nicely calculated that this very dawn should glorify the sky at this precise moment; and that e'er the sun of this day set, thousands upon thousands of human beings should raise their smiling lips in rapture, or their bloodshot eyes in pain! How many now, out across this big, beautiful, blushingly awakening world, were undreaming of their approaching joy—or unconscious of their creeping doom? Over and over in his mind Dale weighed these thoughts. The universe was becoming a fascinating, tremendous force to him. This day, just now coming over the hill, so weighted with its black and white bounties—what was it bringing to him?
"I know!" he cried, snatching up his clothes. "I get freedom, an' he," here his clenched fist shook toward Brent's room, "gets jail!"
Feverishly dressing, he stamped down to the library—his paradise; regardless of whom he might be disturbing at this hour.