HE following night was a cloudless, moonlit one, and restlessly and heart-sore Helen walked the upper floor of the veranda, her eyes constantly bent on the street leading past Dwight's on to the centre of the town. The greater part of the day she had spent with Linda, trying to pacify her and rouse the hope that Pete would not be implicated in the trouble in the mountains. Helen had gone down to Carson's office about noon, feeling vaguely that he could advise her better than any one else in the grave situation. She had found Garner seated at his desk, bent over a law-book, a studious expression on his face. Seeing her in the doorway, he sprang up gallantly and proffered a rickety chair, from which he had hastily dumped a pile of old newspapers.
“Is Carson in?” she asked, sitting down.
“Oh no, he's gone over to the farm,” Garner said. “I couldn't hold him here after he heard of the trouble. You see, Miss Helen, he thinks, from a few things picked up, that Pete is likely to be suspected and be roughly handled, and, you know, as he was partly the cause of the boy's going there, he naturally would feel—”
“I was the real cause of it,” the girl broke in, with a sigh and a troubled face. “We both thought it was for the best, and if it results in Pete's death I shall never forgive myself.”
“Oh, I wouldn't look at it that way,” Garner said. “You were both acting for what you thought was right. As I say, I tried my best to keep Carson from going over there to-day, but he would go. We almost had an open rupture over it. You see, Miss Helen, I have set my head on seeing him in the legislature, and he is eternally doing things that kill votes. There is not a thing in the category of political offences as fatal as this very thing. He's already taken Pete's part and abused the men who whipped him, and now that the boy is suspected of retaliating and killing the Johnsons, why, the people will—well, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see them jump on Carson himself. Men infuriated like that haven't any more sense than mad dogs, and they won't stand for a white man opposing them. But, of course, you know why Carson is acting so recklessly.”
“I do? What do you mean, Mr. Garner?”
The lawyer smiled, wiped his facile mouth with his small white hand, and said, teasingly: “Why, you are at the bottom of it. Carson wants to save the boy simply because you are indirectly interested in him. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. He's been as mad as a wet hen ever since they whipped Pete, because he was the son of your old mammy, and now that the boy's in actual peril Carson has gone clean daft. Well, it's reported among the gossips about town that you turned him down, Miss Helen—like you did some of the balance of us presumptuous chaps that didn't know enough to keep our hearts where they belonged—but you sat on the best man in the bunch when you did it. It's me that's doing this talking.”