“You may guess,” said McMasters, suddenly dull red. “Most of you have guessed.”
“We have!” asserted Nabours. “Miss Taisie, ma’am”—he turned to the white-faced girl—“this here is hard for you. Del won’t talk and won’t vote. The rest of us thinks the trunk and wagon is not explained. Am I right, men?”
Four men nodded. Del Williams, gentleman in rags, sat staring straight ahead. The gray eyes of Dan McMasters were fixed on the pale face of the woman whom now he knew he had loved since first he saw her, would always love. What price?
“We’re the jury, ma’am,” said Nabours. “You’re the judge. It looks to us like all along the McMasterses was Yankee sympathizers. It looks like this man, after all, was standing in with his own kind of politics at Austin. That explains a lot of things that’s been going on. Rangers? Arrest them folks? Huh! I’ll bet they won’t stay in jail two days! You’ll have to say sentence on this man we-all thought was square, thought was our friend, a square Texan and a good man. What shall it be?”
Taisie Lockhart, Portia, spoke not of the quality of mercy. Instead, she bowed her head in her hands and wept without reserve. That act utterly changed the whole complexion of the trial.
Dan McMasters threw up a hand—his left hand. An instant later he was on his feet, but his attitude had no hostility.
“Wait, men!” he commanded. “Don’t move, any of you! I’ll pronounce sentence on myself!
“Of course, I don’t recognize any trial or any court here—I came myself. But some men do fool things. You’d like enough say death or banishment. All right! Let it be banishment! You haven’t proved more than a suspicion. I’ll accept banishment and leave the herd quietly now—not taking anything but what I have now, here.”
His face hardened into gray marble.
“If Miss Lockhart has had one suspicion in her mind that I—that I’d—well, touch anything of hers, or of any other human being’s, then it’s plain enough I don’t belong here. I can’t square that for her. She can never square that with me.