The judge got up and drove his hat down hard on his head with his favorite gesture, as though he put the lid on to suppress the impending explosion. “By gum!� he said, and walked out.
That evening Caleb found Sammy asleep in the old leather armchair with his yellow head on the arm, and he snatched him out of it, in spite of Sammy’s vigorous protests, and put him to bed. He never thought that Diana’s arms might have held the child as pitifully, for Diana had a noble heart.
Then followed the greatest case of disputed nomination ever contested west of the Mississippi. The old court-house was packed to its limit, and there were one or two hardy spirits who climbed the tree outside and listened through the open windows. Feeling ran so high when Aaron Todd testified that there was a column of militia in Townhouse Square. It was hot; they were cutting oats in the fields and the rye was nearly ripe, while all the grapes were coloring like new wine.
Aylett and Eaton fought step by step, inch by inch, and the court sat from early morning until candle-light, yet it was three weeks before it went to the jury, and they had been twenty-nine days getting that jury!
Two brilliant lawyers from the East spoke for the defense, and Judge Hollis opened for the plaintiff. It was afternoon; the judge had made an able if somewhat grandiloquent plea, and the court-house was so thronged that men stood on the window-sills, shutting out the view from the trees. Caleb Trench closed the case for Yarnall, and men, remembering his Cresset speech, had refused to leave the court-room for dinner, fearful of losing their seats—or their standing room. Eaton alone left abruptly when he began to speak.
Trench had a peculiarly rich voice, low-toned but singularly clear; he used no gestures, and his attitudes were always easy and unembarrassed when he forgot himself in his work. His personality counted, but it was neither that nor his eloquence which held the court-room spellbound; it was the force of his logic, the power to get down to the root of things, to tear away all illusions and show them the machine as it had existed for nearly twenty years. Incidentally, as it seemed to some, he showed them, beyond all doubt, the fraud and intimidation that had renominated Governor Aylett.
The lights were burning in the court-room and outside in the square when Judge Ladd charged the jury. Not a man left his place as the jurors filed out, except Trench. He went to send a message to Aunt Charity about his two waifs at home, who must not go supperless. He was still out, and Judge Hollis sent for him hastily when the jury came back in twenty minutes. They brought in a verdict of guilty as indicted; the illegal use of money, corruption in office, and intimidation were the charges against Aylett and Eaton and ten others.
At half-past nine that night the militia had to charge in the court-house square to disperse the crowd.
XVIII
COLONEL ROYALL and Diana drove into town in the morning; it was a long drive from Eshcol, and the road led past Paradise Ridge. Diana, from her side of the carriage, noticed the little cabin where Jean Bartlett had died, and saw the shambling figure of Zeb leaning against the door-post. Zeb was talking to a well-dressed man whose back was toward her. A low-growing horse-chestnut partly hid his figure, but afterwards she remembered a curious familiarity about it. At the time her heart was bitter. She had heard nothing but Mrs. Eaton’s version of the scandal of Paradise Ridge for a month, and once, when she drove past the Cross-Roads, she had seen Sammy’s chubby figure sprawling under the trees beside Caleb Trench’s office.