I went at once to Conkwright's office and found him with his feet on a table, contentedly smoking a cob pipe.
"I was just thinking over some points that I want to make," he remarked as I entered.
"And I hope, sir, that you are in the proper humor to make them."
"Can't tell about that. Oratory is as stealthy and as illusive as a weazel at night. You never know when he's coming."
"But do you feel well?" I anxiously inquired.
"Oh, feel first-rate, but that doesn't make any particular difference. Sometimes a man may think that he feels well, but when he gets up to speak he finds that he is simply sluggish. Reckon I'll get through all right. Do the best I can, any way, and if I fail it can't be helped. Guess we'd better go over."
An anxious day that was for me. I looked at Alf, now beginning to grow pale under his imprisonment, and I saw his resentment rise and fall as the state's attorney pictured him, waiting, listening with eagerness for the sound of a horse's hoofs. I was to be a lawyer, to defend men and to prosecute them for money, and yet I wondered how that bright young fellow, with the seeming passion of an honest outcry, could stand there and tell the jury that my friend had committed the foulest murder that had ever reddened the criminal annals of his state. Old man Conkwright sat, twirling his thumbs, and occasionally he would nod at the jurymen as if to call their attention to a rank absurdity. But I did not see how he could offset the evidence and the blazing sentences of that impassioned prosecutor. At last Conkwright's time had come, and when he arose and uttered his first word I felt the chill of a disappointment creeping over me. He was slow and his utterance was as cold as if it had issued from a frost-bitten mouth. I went out and walked round the town, to the livery-stable, where a negro was humming a tune as he washed a horse's back; to the drug-store, where a doctor was dressing a brick-bat wound in a drunken man's scalp—I walked out to the edge of the town, where the farming land lay, and then I turned back. I was thinking of my return home, of the sorrow that I should take with me, of those old people—of Guinea.
Some one called me, and facing about I recognized the telegraph operator coming across a lot. "Glad to see you," he said, coming up and holding out his hand. "Didn't hear about her, did you?"
"Hear about whom?" I asked, not pleased that he should have broken in upon my sorrowful meditation.
"Mrs. McHenry."