I heard him talking rapidly and clearly, not as one talks aloud in soliloquy, but as if he were addressing somebody. I stepped carefully in through the fringe of trees and I found out that Zebulon Kingsley was talking to somebody; he was talking to God!
I listened five seconds and I realized what he was talking about. Then I leaped on him and struck his wrist with the edge of my hand.
He dropped a fat, ugly revolver which had glinted in the starlight. I pounced on it and flung it into the woods as far as muscle, fright, and anger could prevail. When I turned on the judge he had just tugged another revolver out of his pocket, twin of the other weapon. I had a tussle with him to get it, and he fairly squealed in his fury. But I wrenched the thing out of his clutch and threw it; then I pulled him to his feet and patted him all over, as a policeman frisks a prisoner, to make sure that he was not serving as arsenal for more artillery.
“Judge Kingsley,” I kept saying over and over, “your wife! Your daughter! Think of them!”
I was obliged to drag him out of the woods by main strength. I propelled him along the highway and he walked as stiffly as some kind of a wooden figure, moved by springs. His eyes stared straight ahead and his face was white in the starlight.
So we came into the village without a word between us, and I led him by dark lanes to his house.
Then he held back and replied to what I had said in the woods as if I had just spoken.
“I am thinking of them! That’s why I can’t face them!”
Oh, the tone in which he said that! Questions were crowding in my throat, but I did not dare to pry into troubles as deep as Judge Kingsley’s most certainly were. But I had to have some assurance from him.
“Judge Kingsley,” I said, with respect in my voice, “I am meddling, but God knows there was a call for somebody to meddle just now.”