The murderer stood eying them with an amused contempt, and one could recognize the qualities of dominance which, despite his infamies, had won him both fear and admiration.
“Ef ye thinks ye’d ought ter take me along an’ show me ter yore high sheriff,” he suggested, and the finger toyed with the trigger, “I’m right hyar.”
“Afore God, no!” It was Bud who spoke now contradicting his colleague. “I’ve seed Sam Mosebury often times—an’ ye don’t no fashion faver him.”
Sam laughed. “I’ve seed ye afore, too, I reckon,” he commented dryly. “But ef ye don’t know me, I reckon I don’t need ter know you, nuther.”
The two sat atremble in their saddles until the apparition had disappeared in the laurel.
Gray-templed and seamed of face, Dyke Cappeze entered the courthouse at Carnettsville one day a few months later and paused for a moment, his battered law books under his threadbare elbow, to gaze around 60 the murky hall of which his memory needed no refreshing.
About the stained walls hung fly-specked notices of sheriff’s sales, and between them stamped long-haired, lean-visaged men drawn in by litigation or jury service from branchwater and remote valley.
Out where the sun lay mellow on the town square was the brick pavement, on which Cappeze’s law partner had fallen dead ten years ago, because he dared to prosecute too vigorously. Across the way stood the general store upon which one could still see the pock-marking of bullets reminiscent of that day when the Heatons and the Blacks made war, and terrorized the county seat.
Dyke Cappeze looked over it all with a deep melancholy in his eyes. He knew his mountains and loved his people whose virtues were more numerous, if less conspicuous, than their sins. In his heart burned a militant insurgency. These hills cried out for development, and development demanded a conception of law broader gauged and more serious than obtained. It needed fearless courts, unterrified juries, intrepid lawyers.