For a time he was inclined to call to account the lawyers who had pleaded for the State.  Had it not been for their arguments he would have been acquitted.  With an ingenuity he had never supposed to exist they had analyzed his career—­especially the two years of it spent with Uncle Chris—­and showed how it led up to the crime as to an inevitable consequence.  They seemed familiar with everything he had ever done, while they were able to prove beyond cavil that certain of his acts were inspired by sinister motives which he himself knew to have sprung from dissipation at the worst.  It was astonishing how plausible their story was; and he admitted that if anybody else had been accused, he himself would probably have been convinced by it.  Certainly, then, the lawyers must have been to blame—­that is, unless they were only carrying out what others had hired them to do.

That qualifying phrase started a new train of thought.  Mechanically, dip by dip, swaying gently with each stroke as to a kind of rhythm, he drove the canoe onward, while he pondered it.  It was easy to meditate out here, on the wide, empty lake, for no sound broke the midnight stillness but the soft swish of the paddle and the skimming of the broad keel along the water.  It was not by any orderly system of analysis, or synthesis, or syllogism, that Ford, as the hours went by, came at last to his final conclusion; and yet he reached it with conviction.  By a process of elimination he absolved judge, jury, legal profession, and local public from the greater condemnation.  Each had contributed to the error that made him an outlaw, but no one contributor was the whole of the great force responsible.  That force, which had set its component parts to work, and plied them till the worst they could do was done, was the body which they called Organized Society.  To Ford, Organized Society was a new expression.  He could not remember ever to have heard it till it was used in court.  There it had been on everybody’s lips.  Far more than old Chris Ford himself it was made to figure as the injured party.  Though there was little sympathy for the victim in his own person, Organized Society seemed to have received in his death a blow that called for the utmost avenging.  Organized Society was plaintiff in the case, as well as police, jury, judge, and public.  The single human creature who could not apparently gain footing within its fold was Norrie Ford himself.  Organized Society had cast him out.

He had been told that before, and yet the actual fact had never come home to him till now.  In prison, in court, in the cabin in the woods, there had always been some human hand within reach of his own, some human tie, even though it was a chain.  However ignoble, there had been a place for him.  But out here on the great vacant lake there was an isolation that gave reality to his expulsion.  The last man left on earth would not feel more utterly alone.