"It was the act of committing a felony," said Dan Cowles slowly. "It was to save human life. He resisted arrest, and he was armed. It was a felony."
But when old Ephraim Adamson turned his gray face to that of the officer of the law, in his sad eyes there was no resentment. He held out his hand.
"Dan," said he, "thank God you done it! Thank God it's over!"
CHAPTER XXI
A TRUE BILL
Now it was nine o'clock of the Monday morning. The grand jury was in session thus early, and it had thus early brought in a true bill against one Dieudonné Lane for murder in the first degree. The session of the jury had just begun. None of the jury knew of these late events at the house of Aurora Lane.
In his office Judge Henderson was pacing up and down all that morning. He had failed in every attempt to stop the progress of the law. He could not on Sunday afternoon reach by telephone or otherwise the men he wished to see; on Sunday night had seen this horror; and now, early on Monday, there was no way by which even he could arrest the procedure of the grand jury, made up of men who lived here, and who before this had made up their minds on the bill which Slattery, state's attorney, zealous as they, had rushed through at a late session with his own clerks on Sunday night after he had ended his Sabbath motor ride to an adjoining town.
Fate conspired against Judge Henderson and his shrewd plan for delay which was to have left him secure in his ambition and saved in his own conceit. These things now seemed shrunk, faded, unimportant.
He had not slept at all that night. Before him now swept such a panorama as it seemed to him would never let him sleep again. He was indeed facing now the crisis of his life—a crisis not in his material affairs alone, but a crisis of his moral nature. He had learned in one swift lesson what others sometimes learn more deliberately—that the world is not for the use of any one man alone, but for the use of all men who dwell in it. It is the world of human beings who are partners in its use. They stand alike on its soil, they fight there for the same end. They are brothers, even though savage brothers, after all.