"What became of Bud Tilden?" I asked.
"Oh, he got it in the neck for robbin' the mails, just's I told you he would. Peached on himself like a d—— fool and give everything dead away. He left for Kansas this morning. Judge give him twenty years."
He is still in the lock-step at Leavenworth prison. He has kept it up now for two years. His hair is short, his figure bent, his step sluggish. The law is slowly making an animal of him—that wise, righteous law which is no respecter of persons.
III
"ELEVEN MONTHS AND TEN DAYS"
It was a feeble old man of seventy-two this time who sat facing the jury, an old man with bent back, scant gray hair, and wistful, pleading eyes.
He had been arrested in the mountains of Kentucky and had been brought to Covington for trial, chained to another outlaw, one of those "moonshiners" who rob the great distilleries of part of their profits and the richest and most humane Government on earth of part of its revenue.
For eleven months and ten days he had been penned up in one of the steel cages of Covington jail.
I recognized him the moment I saw him.
He was the old fellow who spoke to me from between the bars of his den on my visit the week before to the inferno—the day I found Samanthy North and her baby—and who told me then he was charged with "sellin'" and that he "reckoned" he was the oldest of all the prisoners about him. He had on the same suit of coarse, homespun clothes—the trousers hiked up toward one shoulder from the strain of a single suspender; the waistcoat held by one button; the shirt open at the neck, showing the wrinkled throat, wrinkled as an old saddle-bag, and brown, hairy chest.