“Gentlemen, the court is open.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
AFTER THE VERDICT
Peter Blunt stared helplessly up at the eastern sky. His brain was whirling, and he stared without being conscious of the reason.
He breathed heavily, like a man saturating his lungs with pure air after long confinement in a foul atmosphere. Then it almost seemed as if his great frame shrank in stature, and became suddenly a wreck of itself. As if age and decay had suddenly come upon him. As if the weight of his body had become too heavy for him, and set his great limbs tottering under it as he walked.
The excitement, the straining of thought and nerve had passed, leaving him hopelessly oppressed, twenty years older.
The din and clamor of the final scenes in the saloon were still ringing in his ears. It was all over. The farce of Jim Thorpe’s trial had been played out. But the shouts of men, hungering for the life of a fellow man, still haunted him. The voice of the accuser was still shrieking through his brain. The memory of the stern condemnation of Doc Crombie left his great heart crushed and helpless.
His brain was still whirling with all the strain he had gone through, his pulses were still hammering with the consuming anger which had raged in him as he stood beside his friend defending him to the last. And it had 365 all proved useless. Jim Thorpe had been condemned by the ballot of his fellow citizens. Death––a hideous, disgraceful death was to be his, at the moment when the gray dawn should first lift the eastern corner of the pall of night.