Holcombe eyed the other with an alert, confident smile.  “No, Carroll,” he answered, “I would not.”  He put his hand on the other’s shoulder with a suggestion in his manner of his former self, and with a touch of patronage.  “I have learned a great deal in a month,” he said.  “Seven battles were won in seven days once.  All my life I have been fighting causes, Carroll, and principles.  I have been working with laws against law-breakers.  I have never yet fought a man.  It was not poor old Meakim, the individual, I prosecuted, but the corrupt politician.  Now, here I have been thrown with men and women on as equal terms as a crew of sailors cast away upon a desert island.  We were each a law unto himself.  And I have been brought face to face, and for the first time in my life, not with principles of conduct, not with causes, and not with laws, but with my fellow men.”

THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY

The day was cruelly hot, with unwarranted gusts of wind which swept the red dust in fierce eddies in at one end of Main Street and out at the other, and waltzed fantastically across the prairie.  When they had passed, human beings opened their eyes again to blink hopelessly at the white sun, and swore or gasped, as their nature moved them.  There were very few human beings in the streets, either in Houston Avenue, where there were dwelling-houses, or in the business quarter on Main Street.  They were all at the new court-house, and every one possessed of proper civic pride was either in the packed court-room itself, or standing on the high steps outside, or pacing the long, freshly calcimined corridors, where there was shade and less dust.  It was an eventful day in the history of Zepata City.  The court-house had been long in coming, the appropriation had been denied again and again; but at last it stood a proud and hideous fact, like a gray prison, towering above the bare, undecorated brick stores and the frame houses on the prairie around it, new, raw, and cheap, from the tin statue on the dome to the stucco round its base already cracking with the sun.  Piles of lumber and scaffolding and the lime beds the builders had left still lay on the unsodded square, and the bursts of wind drove the shavings across it, as they had done since the first day of building, when the Hon. Horatio Macon, who had worked for the appropriation, had laid the corner-stone and received the homage of his constituents.

It seemed a particularly happy and appropriate circumstance that the first business in the new court-room should be of itself of an important and momentous nature, something that dealt not only with the present but with the past of Zepata, and that the trial of so celebrated an individual as Abe Barrow should open the court-house with eclat, as Emma Abbott, who had come all the way from San Antonio to do it, had opened the new opera-house the year before.  The District Attorney had said it would not take very long to dispose of Barrow’s case, but he had promised it would be an interesting if brief trial, and the court-room was filled even to the open windows, where men sat crowded together, with the perspiration running down their faces, and the red dust settling and turning white upon their shoulders.