The judge fingering his gavel frowned gravely. “Does counsel mean to charge that the court has proven lax?”
“I mean to say,” declared the lawyer in a voice that suddenly mounted and rung like a trumpeted challenge, “that in these hills of Kentucky the militant spirit of the law seems paralyzed! I mean to say that terrorism towers higher than the people’s safeguards! For a lifetime I have battled here to put the law above the feud—and I have failed. In this courthouse my partner fought for a recognition of justice and at its door he paid the penalty with his life. I wish to make no charges other than to state the facts. I am growing old, and I have lost heart in a vain fight. I wish to withdraw from this case as associate commonwealth counsel, because I can do nothing more than I have done, and that is enough. I wish to state publicly that to-day I shall take down my shingle and withdraw from the practice of law, because law among us seems to me a misnomer and a futile semblance.”
In a dead silence the elderly attorney came to his period and gathered up again under his threadbare elbow his two or three battered books. Turning, he walked down the center aisle toward the door, and 63 as he went his head sagged dejectedly forward on his chest.
He heard the instruction of his enemy on the bench, still suave:
“Mr. Clerk, let the order be entered striking the name of Mr. Cappeze from the record as associate counsel for the commonwealth.”
It was early forenoon when the elderly attorney left the dingy law office which he was closing, and the sunset fires were dying when he swung himself down from the saddle at his own stile in the hills and walked between the bee-gums and bird boxes to his door. But before he reached it the stern pain in his eyes yielded to a brightening thought, and as if responsive to that thought the door swung open and in it stood a slim girl with eyes violet deep, and a beauty so alluring and so wildly natural that her father felt as if youth had met him again, when he had begun to think of all life as musty and decrepit with age.
CHAPTER VI
Except in that narrow circle of American life which follows the doings and interests of the army and navy, the world had forgotten, in the several years since its happening, the court-martial and disgrace of John Spurrier—but Spurrier himself had not been able to forget.