But I didn't. As we stepped into the hall, a boy with a telegram came toward me. It was a forwarded message from Oakdale, where they had failed to find me:
"Come back to onct. There is a trouble on the girl. BARNEY."
"He means Jean," I exclaimed, handing the slip to Clyde. "I know he means Jean. Confound him for not being more explicit. What can have happened?"
"You'll go at once, of course?" said Clyde promptly.
"I can't go till a train starts." And then I remembered how my going would affect Clyde. "I'll have time to lay this letter of yours before the court before I go, in any event. And I shouldn't want to take any chances of a train wreck with that document in my pocket."
But you can imagine the fever I was in till I could get off. I saw the proper officials and took the necessary steps to secure judicial recognition of the important paper which was to restore Clyde's life, liberty, and happiness, and though he could not, of course, be released at a moment's notice, I had the satisfaction of seeing the procedure started that would enable him in a short time to face the world a free man, with the secret terror that had shadowed his life for fifteen years forever laid. But I went through it all like a man in a dream. Through all that was said and done I was hearing every moment, like a persistent cry,--
"Come back at once! Jeans needs you,--Jean needs you!"
After leaving the court house I still had hours--ages!--to wait at the station, and the pictures my imagination conjured up were not soothing company. I had telegraphed Barney that I was coming, but after that I could do nothing but fret myself to a fever waiting. I got off, finally, but all through the night and all the next day the singing wheels of the train were beating out the refrain,--
"She needs me! She needs me!"