Forsyth read the note and swore gratefully.
“You are to be congratulated, Jarvis; you have done what none of the rest of us have been able to do. He consents to accept Judge Langford as his counsel.” And the editor went quickly to the telephone to call up the house in the Highlands.
This was the skirling of the bell which had interrupted the master of Hollywood as he was sitting down to his dinner, and which had made Dorothy linger on the stair to hear what should come of it.
“What is it, papa?” she asked, when her father replaced the earpiece in its hook.
“It is a message from Mr. Forsyth. Brant has notified him that he will accept me as his counsel, and has promised not to obstruct us any more. You may take that for a grain of comfort.”
But Dorothy still lingered. “Is the time set for the trial, papa?”
“Yes; Tuesday of next week. But don’t grieve till you must. We shall be ready, and we shall do all there is to be done.”
“One week from to-day—one little week!” She said it over and over to herself in the darkness after her father had gone back to the dining room, and the grain of comfort was swallowed up in foreboding.
The week of waiting was outworn at length, slowly for the State’s attorneys, since their case was already made, but all too swiftly for Brant’s friends. At the end of it Judge Langford went into court with as little of weight to say for his client as any advocate of a man who was already tried and found guilty by public opinion could have. Of that little he made the best possible use, and his eloquent plea to the jury had in it all the fire and fervour and pathos of a strong man who had once been the ablest special pleader in a section where eloquence is in some sort a birthright.
But the judge fought a losing battle from the beginning; he knew it, and all the others knew it. Though the prisoner had receded from his original determination, and had pleaded “Not guilty,” the plea was taken to be wholly a matter of form. His guilt was tacitly admitted by all, and the judge’s appeal was for clemency rather than for acquittal. “If this man had done this thing,” was the preface to each fresh outburst of eloquent beseeching.