“May I offer you a glass of liquor?” asked Fentress, breaking the silence. He stepped to the walnut centertable where there was a decanter and glasses. By a gesture the judge declined the invitation. Whereat the colonel looked surprised, but not so surprised as Mahaffy. There was another silence.
“I don't think we ever met before?” observed Fentress. There was something in the fixed stare his visitor was bending upon him that he found disquieting, just why, he could not have told.
But that fixed stare of the judge's continued. No, the man had not changed—he had grown older certainly, but age had not come ungracefully; he became the glossy broadcloth and spotless linen he wore. Here was a man who could command the good things of life, using them with a rational temperance. The room itself was in harmony with his character; it was plain but rich in its appointments, at once his library and his office, while the well-filled cases ranged about the walls showed his tastes to be in the main scholarly and intellectual.
“How long have you lived here?” asked the judge abruptly. Fentress seemed to hesitate; but the judge's glance, compelling and insistent, demanded an answer.
“Ten years.”
“You have known many men of all classes as a lawyer and a planter?” said the judge. Fentress inclined his head. The judge took a step nearer him. “People have a great trick of coming and going in these western states—all sorts of damned riffraff drift in and out of these new lands.” A deadly earnestness lifted the judge's words above mere rudeness. Fentress, cold and distant, made no reply. “For the past twenty years I have been looking for a man by the name of Gatewood—David Gatewood.” Disciplined as he was, the colonel started violently. “Ever heard of him, Fentress?” demanded the judge with a savage scowl.
“What's all this to me?” The words came with a gasp from Fentress' twitching lips. The judge looked at him moody and frowning.
“I have reason to think this man Gatewood came to west Tennessee,” he said.
“If so, I have never heard of him.”
“Perhaps not under that name—at any rate you are going to hear of him now. This man Gatewood, who between ourselves was a damned scoundrel”—the colonel winced—“this man Gatewood had a friend who threw money and business in his way—a planter he was, same as Gatewood. A sort of partnership existed between the pair. It proved an expensive enterprise for Gatewood's friend, since he came to trust the damned scoundrel more and more as time passed—even large sums of his money were in Gatewood's hands—” the judge paused. Fentress' countenance was like stone, as expressionless and as rigid.