"The testimony is before you, gentlemen of the jury. I have nothing to add to it."
There was but one result possible. Ten minutes after the jury retired, it filed into court again bearing a verdict of "Guilty."
Boyd Westover was a convicted felon. The sun of his fair young life had gone down amid clouds of black disgrace, and it could know no rising. Worse than death a thousand fold, worse than the cruelest torture was this to a proudly sensitive nature, nurtured in traditions of honor that held every slightest character stain to be an indelible blot.
Yet it was with head erect, with dry eyes, with unshaken nerves and unflinching spirit that he met this decree of doom. It was the tradition of his race to meet Fate without faltering, to fight while the possibility of fighting lasted, and when it failed, to shroud an undaunted soul in the chain mail of unconquerable courage.
When the verdict was rendered, the young man turned to his friend and counsellor, and in an entirely unemotional voice, said:
"I thank you sincerely for all you have done and tried to do. I have need of a little time in which to arrange my affairs. Can you do me a final favor by securing it for me?"
The matter was easily arranged. The Judge, full of compassion for the ruined youth, and in spite of reason, testimony, and everything else, still not believing in Boyd Westover's guilt, asked if ten days would suffice. Then without renewing the bail bonds that had expired with the beginning of the trial, he appointed the tenth day thereafter for sentence. It was the Commonwealth's Attorney's business to move for the renewal of the bonds, without which the condemned man was in fact under no restraint whatever, but he made no motion of the kind. When asked by Jack Towns some time afterwards why he had not done his duty in that respect, he replied:
"I simply couldn't. Boyd Westover and I were schoolmates, you know, and I lived for many months in his father's house. I knew he wouldn't run away. Who ever heard of a Westover flinching? Why should I subject him to an indignity?"
Thus, in Virginia, did character—personal and inherited—count. There were some things that a gentleman could not do. He might commit a crime of violence, but he could not do a cowardly or treacherous act. The bailiff who had trusted Boyd Westover's word of honor, knew that and risked the loss of his place upon his confidence in it. The Commonwealth's Attorney knew it and took the chance of impeachment upon it.
The net result was that on the day of his conviction Boyd Westover walked out of court an absolutely free man except in so far as he was bound by his own sense of honor and by the traditions of the race from which he was sprung. These bound him to appear in court for sentence at the end of the ten days allowed to him, and as everybody knew, the bond was amply sufficient.