Louise’s little table was drawn closely before the window nearest the court. She owed this thoughtfulness to Gordon, who, nevertheless, was not in complete sympathy with her, because she had cried. The table was on the sunny side, but there was a breeze out of the west and it played refreshingly over her face, and blew short strands of her fair hair there also. To Gordon, wrapped up as he was in graver matters, her sweet femininity began to insist on a place in his mental as well as his physical vision. She was exquisitely neat and trim in her white shirt-waist with its low linen collar and dark blue ribbon tie of the same shade as her walking skirt, and the smart little milliner’s bow on her French sailor hat, though it is to be doubted if Gordon observed the harmony. She seemed strangely out of place in this room, so bare of comfort, so stuffy and stenchy and smoke-filled; yet, after all, she seemed perfectly at home here. The man in Gordon awoke, and he was glad she had not stayed at home or gone away because she cried.
Yes, Jim was there—and swaggering. It was impossible for Jim not to swagger a little on any occasion. The impulse to swagger had been born in him. It had been carefully nurtured from the date of his first connection with the Three Bars. He bestowed an amiable grin of recognition on the new reporter from the far side of the room, which was not very far.
The prisoner was brought in. His was a familiar personality. He was known to most men west of the river—if not by personal acquaintance, certainly by hearsay. Many believed him to be the animating mind of a notorious gang of horse thieves and cattle rustlers that had been operating west of the river for several years. Lax laws were their nourishment. They polluted the whole. It was a deadly taint to fasten itself on men’s relations. Out of it grew fear, bribery, official rottenness, perjury. There was an impudent half smile on his lips. He was a tall, lean, slouching-shouldered fellow. To-day, his jaws were dark with beard bristles of several days’ standing. He bore himself with an easy, indifferent manner, and chewed tobacco enjoyingly.
Louise, glancing casually around at the mass of interested, sunbrowned faces, suddenly gave a little start of surprise. Not far in front of Jimmie Mac’s table stood the man of the sandy coloring who had so insolently disputed their right of way the day before. His hard, light eyes, malignant, sinister, significant, were fixed upon the prisoner as he slouched forward to hear his arraignment. The man in custody yawned occasionally. He was bored. His whole body had a lazy droop. So far as Louise could make out he gave no sign of recognition of the man of sandy coloring.
Then came the first great surprise of this affair of many surprises. Jesse Black waived examination. It came like a thunderbolt to the prosecution. It was not Black’s way of doing business, and it was generally believed that, as Munson had so forcibly though inelegantly expressed it to Billy Brown, “He would fight like hell” to keep out of the circuit courts. He would kill this incipient Nemesis in the bud. What, then, had changed him? The county attorney had rather looked for a hard-fought defence—a shifting of the burden of responsibility for the misbranding to another, who would, of course, be off somewhere on a business trip, to be absent an indefinite length of time; or it might be he would try to make good a trumped-up story that he had but lately purchased the animal from some Indian cattle-owner from up country who claimed to have a bill-of-sale from Langford. He would not have been taken aback had Black calmly produced a bill-of-sale.
There were lines about the young attorney’s mouth, crow’s feet diverging from his eyes; his forehead was creased, too. He was a tall man, slight of build, with drooping shoulders. One of the noticeable things about him was his hands. They were beautiful—the long, slim, white kind that attract attention, not so much, perhaps, on account of their graceful lines, as because they are so seldom still. They belong preëminently to a nervous temperament. Gordon had trained himself to immobility of expression under strain, but his hands he had not been able so to discipline. They were always at something, fingering the papers on his desk, ruffling his hair, or noisily drumming. Now he folded them as if to coerce them into quiet. He had handsome eyes, also, too keen, maybe, for everyday living; they would be irresistible if they caressed.
The absoluteness of the surprise flushed his clean-shaven face a little, although his grave immobility of expression underwent not a flicker. It was a surprise, but it was a good surprise. Jesse Black was bound over under good and sufficient bond to appear at the next regular term of the circuit court in December. That much accomplished, now he could buckle down for the big fight. How often had he been shipwrecked in the shifting sands of the really remarkable decisions of “Old Necessity” and his kind. This time, as by a miracle, he had escaped sands and shoals and sunken rocks, and rode in deep water.
A wave of enlightenment swept over Jim Munson.
“Boss,” he whispered, “that gal reporter’s a hummer.”
“How so?” whispered Langford, amused. He proceeded to take an interested, if hasty, inventory of her charms. “What a petite little personage, to be sure! Almost too colorless, though. Why, Jim, she can’t hold a tallow candle to Williston’s girl.”