"You knew it last night, and yet you didn't send somebody to hold me up and take the papers away from me?"
The senator's chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty chest.
"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship, Evan, boy. Maybe I was saying to myself: 'No, I reckon the boy won't do it, after all—not when he reads what's set down in the papers; he just naturally couldn't do it.'"
"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response. "Can't you see that you are killing me by inches? Can't you see that I've got to choose between being a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and shifty as any of those I have been denouncing? My God, it's terrible!"
"I reckon you're going to choose straight," said the older man, still with eyes averted.
"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps it would be truer to say that there never has been any choice since the moment when I set my foot in the path which has led me thus far on the way to hell. I can despise myself utterly for the means I took to secure the evidence, but that very lapse makes it all the more needful that I should atone as I can."
David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.
"Son, you are a man among a thousand—among ten thousand," he said quietly. "When it comes to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right and wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran'pap, the judge, did when he had to sentence one of his own sons for killing an Indian. You haven't said it in so many words, so I'll say it for you: you've got me, and maybe some others, right where you can shove us into the penitentiary. That's about what you're trying to tell me, isn't it?"
"For God's sake, don't put it that way!" Blount protested. "I gave you fair warning almost at the first. I've got to fight for the right as I see it. If I don't, I shall be less than a man—less than your son. Can't you see that it is breaking my heart?"
A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities settled down upon the isolated room, with the stillness broken only by the crackling of the fire and that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the roof. At the end of the pause the senator took a forward step and put a hand on his son's shoulder.