The judge turned back into the room to throw another stick on the fire. The lamp was burning low; he reached over to turn up the wick. The flame jumped, faltered, went out.
“Hah, I’ve turned it out, Morgan. Well, no matter. You’ll not need more light than the fire throws. Make yourself comfortable, Morgan.”
With a word to Hiram, the judge opened the door and stepped out into the night.
On the pavement the wind met him rudely, and the rain drove its cold arrows against his kind old face. Wonderful are the ways of Providence, thought Judge Maxwell, bending his head to bring his broad hat-brim to shield his face, and complete are the accounts of justice when it is given that men may see them down to the final word.
The wind laid hold of the judge’s coat, and tugged at it like a vicious dog; it raged in the gaunt trees, and split in long sighs upon the gable-ends and eaves. There was nobody 354 abroad. For Shelbyville the hour was late; Judge Maxwell had the street to himself as he held on his way.
Past the court-house he fought the wind, and a square beyond that. There he turned down a small street, where the force of the blast was broken, looking narrowly about him to right and left at the fronts of houses as he passed.
Simeon Harrison, Ollie Chase’s father, lately had given over his unprofitable struggle with the soil. He had taken a house near the Methodist church and gone into the business of teaming. He hauled the merchants’ goods up from the railroad station, and moved such inhabitants of Shelbyville as once in a while made a change from one abode to another.
Sim had come to Shelbyville with a plan for setting up a general livery business, in which ambition he had been encouraged by Ollie’s marriage to Isom Chase, to whom he looked, remotely, for financial backing. But that had turned out a lean and unprofitable dream.
Since Isom’s death Ollie had returned to live with her parents, and Sim’s prospects had brightened. He had put a big sign in front of his house, upon which he had listed the many services which he stood ready to perform for mankind, in consideration of payment therefor. They ranged from moving trunks to cleaning cisterns, and, by grace of all of them, Sim was doing very well.
When Sim Harrison heard of his daughter’s public confession of shameful conduct with her book-agent boarder, he was a highly scornful man. He scorned her for her weakness in yielding to what he termed the “dally-faddle” of the book-agent, and he doubly scorned her for repudiating her former testimony. The moral side of the matter was obscure to him; it made no appeal.