“Save your tears, madam, until they are needed,” said the judge, not feeling that he was called upon to explain the purpose of his visit to her.
“I’m ready to go,” announced Ollie, hooded and cloaked in the door.
Sim Harrison was stirring about overhead. He came to the top of the stairs with a lamp in his hand, and wanted to know what the rumpus was about.
“It’s Judge Maxwell–he’s come for Ollie!” said his wife, in a despairing wail.
“I knowed it, I knowed it!” declared Sim, with fatalistic resignation, above which there was perhaps a slight note of triumph in seeing his own prediction so speedily fulfilled.
To Harrison and his wife there was no distinction between the executive and judicial branches of the law. Judge or sheriff, it was all one to them, each being equally terrible in their eyes.
“When can she come home, Judge, when can she come back?” appealed Mrs. Harrison, in anguished pleading.
“It rests with her,” returned the judge.
He gave Ollie his arm, and they passed together in silence up the street. They had proceeded a square before the judge spoke. 357
“I am calling you on an unusual mission, Mrs. Chase,” he said, “but I did not know a better way than this to go about what I felt it my duty to do.”