“If you should live through your second term you will have served twenty-eight years and you will be near sixty years of age—a very hoary-headed sinner, indeed! And yet, at the end of that time, the United States will want you on a charge of highway robbery and attempted murder, and will get you under the international extradition treaty. And you will pass the remainder of your guilty life in an American prison, where not only are the strong and rebellious criminals compelled to labor, but the aged, the infirm, and the invalids are scourged and driven to hard work, until they drop dead (if all tales be true). ‘Do you like the picture?’”
A blast of fury, profanity and indecency, more diabolical than all that bad preceded it, stormed from the mouth of the madman, and raved like a whirlwind around the ears of the listener.
When this had died of its own frenzy, Legg spoke again and for the last time.
“Do you know, you fiend, who are here? I will tell you! The witnesses who will convict you of every crime known to mankind. There on the sofa, at the opposite end of this room, a little in the shadow, sits your wife, Jennie Montgomery, whom you married, deserted and afterward stabbed, and left for dead in the streets in New York. There she sits between her mother and father, all three bent on prosecuting you to the full extent of the law! Look attentively and you will see them! There, talking with Lawyer Walling, is Randolph Hay, your benefactor, who saved you from starving and shared his hut with you in the mining camp of Grizzly Gulch, and whom you robbed, tried to murder and left for dead in the Black Woods of California so that you might claim his name and place with impunity! He will be compelled to prosecute you! And across the hall, in the library with her father, is the woman you deceived into a false marriage. She will prosecute you with all the vim, venom and virulence of a proud, outraged and revengeful woman. That is, if she does not prefer to execute you with her own hands.”
Clay Legg should have known the dangerous wild beast he was goading to madness, yet he went on with a strange fatuity.
Gentleman Geff had followed with his eyes the index of Clay Legg to the distant sofa, on which sat the wronged wife, Jennie Montgomery, between her father and her mother. He had slowly but surely recognized her, stared at her in stupid dismay until he was again stung to fury by the insulting words of Clay Legg, when he turned his kindling eyes on the face of the man who was drawing such a degrading picture of his fate. It seemed then that it only needed the cessation of the sound of the speaker’s voice to break the spell that held the demoniac; for no sooner had it ceased than he sprang to his feet with a terrible roar and hurled himself toward Legg.
But the latter saw his peril with the speed of lightning and fled away, leaving others to brave the storm he himself had raised.
In an instant the maniac was raging in the midst of “the goodlie company,” and all was fear, panic and confusion.
Little Mike, unhappily, was nearest to the madman and first to attempt to pacify him. But the demon caught up a heavy astral lamp from the table nearest to him and shivered it upon the head of the willing peacemaker, who fell like a slaughtered sheep.
Judy’s shrieks of agony rang out upon the air, and brought the terrified servants to the drawing-room doors.