The minister sank back to his seat upon the mossy log, and bowed his head into his hands. “Oh, my God!” he breathed.
There followed a silence, during which Blake gazed upon the huddled figure. Then he turned his set face down the glittering, dwindled stream, and, one shoulder lightly against the sycamore, he watched the sun there at the river’s end sink softly down into its golden slumber.
CHAPTER XI
THE TRIAL
Katherine’s first thought, on leaving Bruce’s office, was to lay her discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they could quickly discover wherein he had been duped—for she still held him to be an unwitting tool—and thus quickly clear up the whole case. But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him out of her reach until the trial was over.
In sharpest disappointment, Katherine went home. With the trial so few hours away, with all her new discoveries buzzing chaotically in her head, she felt the need of advising with some one about the situation. Bruce’s offer of assistance recurred to her, and she found herself analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his rightness—courageous, unselfish, sincere—that was the way she now saw the editor of the Express.
But he had sneered at her, sharply criticized her, and she hotly spurned the thought of asking his aid. Instead of him, she that evening summoned Old Hosie Hollingsworth to her house, and to the old lawyer she told everything. Old Hosie was convinced that she was right, and was astounded.
“And to think that the good folks of this town used to denounce me as a worshipper of strange gods!” he ejaculated. “Gee, what’ll they say when they learn that the idol they’ve been wearing out their knee-caps on has got clay feet that run clear up to his Adam’s-apple!”