He raised his heavy bloodshot eyes and looked into the gambler’s smiling face.  He realized the futility of his act, since it had placed him irrevocably in Gilmore’s power.  He had endured unspeakable anguish all to no purpose, since Gilmore knew; knew with the certitude of an eye-witness.  And there the gambler sat smiling and at ease, torturing him with his cunning speech.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LOVE THAT ENDURES

A melancholy wind raked the bare hills which rose beyond the flats, and found its way across half the housetops in Mount Hope to the solitary window that gave light and air to John North’s narrow cell.  For seven long days, over the intervening housetops, he had been observing those undulating hills, gazing at them until they seemed like some great live thing continually crawling along the horizon’s rim, and continually disappearing in the distance.  Now he was watching their misted shapes sink deep into the twilight.

North, by his counsel, had waved the usual preliminary hearing before the mayor, his case had gone at once to the grand jury, he had been indicted and his trial was set for the February term of court.  Watt Harbison had warned him that he might expect only this, yet his first feeling of astonished horror remained with him.

As he stood by his window he was recalling the separate events of the day.  The court room had been crowded to the verge of suffocation; when he entered it a sudden hush and a mighty craning of necks had been his welcome, and he had felt his cheeks redden and pale with a sense of shame at his hapless plight.  Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on him seemed to lay bare his inmost thoughts; he had known no refuge from their pitiless insistence.

In that close overheated room the vitiated air had slowly mounted to the brain; soon a third of the spectators nodded in their chairs scarcely able to keep awake; others moved restlessly with a dull sense of physical discomfort, while the law, expressing itself in archaic terms, wound its way through a labyrinth of technicalities, and reached out hungrily for his very life.

He knew that he would be given every opportunity to establish his innocence, but he could not rid himself of the ugly disconcerting belief that a man hunt was on, and that he, the hunted creature, was to be driven from cover to cover while the state drew its threads of testimony about him strand by strand, until they finally reached his very throat, choking, strangling, killing!

He thought of Elizabeth and was infinitely sorry.  She must forget him, she must go her way and leave him to go his—­or the law’s.  He could face the ruin of his own life, but it must stop there!  He wondered what they were saying and doing at Idle Hour; he wondered what the whole free world was doing, while he stood there gazing from behind his bars at the empurpled hills in the distance.