Harshaw considered a knowledge of human nature as essential a tool of his
trade as the Tennessee Reports, and the common human attributes, so far
as he had discerned them, were definitely abstracted and tabulated in his
mind,—for he was systematic mentally.
Nevertheless, he was profoundly ignorant of these traits as manifested in
his own personality. Had another member of the legislature risen in his
place one day, when the spring was just beginning to open, stating that
he desired to make a motion based on public rumor, to which he considered
the attention of the House should be directed, Harshaw could not have
failed to note the ring of triumph in the voice, the predatory gleam in
the eye, the restive eagerness of address, the swift fluency of excited
words. He would not have been slow to deny to the demonstration those
motives so insistently arrogated,—public justice, patriotism, sense of
duty.
His manner had riveted the attention of the House, which was more
than usually quiet. It had that sombre, undecorative aspect common to
assemblages exclusively of men. The effect of uniformity of attire was,
however, annulled in a measure by the varying expressions in countenance,
in age, in attitude. The metropolitan representatives had a more dapper
appearance than the members from the outlying districts, who were
distinguished by a solid and serious mien that promised an intolerance of
flippancy in matters of religion, and morals, and manners.
Here and there was a face individual enough to arrest attention.
Kinsard’s head, with its high, earnest brow, its roving, melancholy black
eyes, its sharp, characteristic features, stood out from the rest in
strong relief, canceling the heads about it to a nebulous suggestion
of humanity. He lounged in one of the most negligent of his dislocated
postures. He had a smile of bitter contempt on his face, which bore no
relation to his attitude of indifference, and expressed an energy of
anger which he was at a loss how best to wreak. More than once he looked
away from Harshaw, as if to divert his thoughts, to allay his irritation,
by the contemplation of the scene without.
The windows stood open to the bland spring air. The languid, quiescent
sunshine loitered along the great white stone porticoes, looking in
often, a smiling, sheeny presence, upon the grave deliberations within.
The river glistened in lustrous curves between high banks fringed
with green as far as the eye could reach. The roofs of the city below
were almost smokeless,—only here and there a wreathing hazy curl. The
old forts on the hills wore all the dismantled and sunken aspect of
desuetude, and gathered into the scars of war the blossoms of peace and
the nestlings, and garnered the songs and the smiles of spring to make
the waste places merry.
Hardly a sound entered at the window,—only the droning of a portly bee
which, arrayed in a splendid buff jerkin and a black belt, came swiftly
in and went again in a slant of sunshine. Harshaw’s voice, echoing from
the stone walls, seemed doubly weighty and impressive and resonant.
The House had already received an intimation of what he was about to
say, and although his animosity to Gwinnan impugned his credibility and
relaxed the surprise which had been occasioned, his bold overt allusions
to his antagonism, his sturdy, undaunted address, had their effect. He
said he must impinge upon the indulgence of the House for some personal
explanation. Had he consulted his own inclinations he would have let
the matter pass. It had come to his knowledge with no solicitation, no
suspicion, by accident, or—with a reverent intonation—providentially,
he might better say. But (suspended effect) he was sworn (with a wag of
the head) to serve the interests of the people of Tennessee, and (he
thumped the desk) right zealously would he discharge that precious and
supreme trust! The duty of laying this matter before the representatives
of the people was the more distasteful to him because he was personally
in antagonism to Judge Gwinnan, whose title to the judicial office it
controverted and whose integrity it assailed. He did not seek to disguise
the truth; he wished it to be understood—and let the fact have what
weight it might—that he would be glad to see Judge Gwinnan removed from
the office which it was charged he had profaned. Apart from all else, he
had practiced in Gwinnan’s circuit; he had experienced his tyranny; he
had seen a jury snatched from their deliberations and clapped into jail
for some petty ignorant infringement of the deep reverence which Judge
Gwinnan exacted for his presence. No!—and the walls rang with the strong,
robust tones,—he would esteem Judge Gwinnan’s removal a source of great
gratulation and a furtherance of justice. But he would be glad, for his
own private considerations, if the circumstances upon which the motion
would presently be made could have come to the ear of some other member;
he appreciated that there was (sneering and smiling) a lack of grace,
of seemliness, in the emanation of the proposition from him, an avowed
personal enemy; moreover, he might expose himself to suspicions of his
motive.
“Right for once!” cried the unruly Kinsard, striking in suddenly.
The gavel sounded, and the interruption subsided.
Harshaw’s opaque blue eyes turned mechanically in the direction of the
voice, but with a preoccupied air of seeing nothing he went on, holding
the lapels of his coat, as he stood squarely beside his desk.
He could have evaded; he could have delegated the duty to another
member,—have made the facts known, have had the witnesses canvassed,
have set the machinery in motion, without himself appearing at all.
“But, Mr. Speaker,” with an arrogant port, “it is not my habit to beat
about the bush. I may be maligned by my foes, I may be misinterpreted by
my friends, I may be misjudged even by my constituents, but it is my
principle to come forth openly, and let my personal feeling weigh for
whatever it may be worth.”
He paused for a moment, stroking his yellow beard with an excited
gesture, his flushed face grave, his eyes intent, absorbed; his whole
presence instinct with determination, a hazardous tenacity, a ponderous
force. Then dropping his voice to the artificial dead-level elocutionary
intonation, he proceeded to make a formal motion that a committee be
appointed to investigate and report upon the accusations brought against
Judge Gwinnan, charging him with having fought a duel, thus being
disqualified for office; and with perjury in taking the official oath.
There was an interval of absolute silence when he had resumed his seat.
Significant glances were interchanged. It seemed that the motion would be
lost, until a little bland, cat-like fellow arose to say in a falsetto
voice, “Mr. Speaker, I second the motion.”
Kinsard turned his indolent anatomy about and looked with a scathing eye
at the little man, as, flushed and flustered, he took his seat. There was
no possible propriety in the charge of collusion; the two members had all
the liberties of consultation and coöperation. Then why, he argued within
himself, should Forsey look like a cat stealing cream? Bestirring his
recollection, he recalled in him a certain willingness to think ill of
Judge Gwinnan when previously threatened by Harshaw; and still dredging
for a motive, he remembered, though it happened some years ago, that
Gwinnan, sitting as special judge, had blocked the game of a big public
contract swindle, in which Forsey had had a large money interest.
Forsey had not the nerve of Harshaw, who was looking about him in
reddening displeasure and frowning prognostication of the baffling of his
vengeance. If he had indeed no backing but the irresolute Mr. Forsey, the
measure would be defeated by a most triumphant majority. The prospect
roused all his belligerent spirit, and he held up his head with a snort
of defiant welcome, like a war-horse smelling the battle from afar, when,
the question being stated from the chair, a member rose to say that he
doubted the jurisdiction of the House.
“If this matter be reported correctly as I have heard it during the
last two or three days,—to my very great surprise,—if Judge Gwinnan be
disqualified by reason of having before his incumbency fought a duel,
then he never was a judge except _de facto_. As I understand it, only an
officer _de jure_ can be impeached for crimes committed in office.”
Forsey wanted to know if perjury in taking the official oath were not a
crime committed in office.
Another member asked whether it was the commission of the crime itself
which disqualified, or the conviction of the crime.
The gavel sounded, and the member who had the floor persisted.
“I take it that the House cannot prefer articles of impeachment against a
private citizen who has unlawfully usurped an office. If he is removed at
all, it should be by proceedings in the chancery court in the nature of a
_quo warranto_.”
Mr. Kinsard rose, half leaning against his desk with a swaying negligence
of posture, to call attention to the fact that anything in the nature
of _quo warranto_ wouldn’t begin to do. To have a little one-horse
chancellor way up yonder in the seclusion of the mountains dump Judge
Gwinnan out of his office would not serve the purpose. Could any man
imagine that that proceeding, known merely to the members of the bar and
the few intelligent citizens of that benighted district who took note
of such matters, would satisfy such an animosity as the member from the
floaterial district of Cherokee and Kildeer had avowed, with a cheek
which might be contemplated only in astounded admiration? Would the
infliction of that limited degradation glut the member’s ravening greed
for revenge for his personal grudges? No! the member wished to disgrace
Judge Gwinnan with all the publicity that even the attempt to impeach
would entail—he designed that it should be canvassed throughout the
length and breadth of the State. It should resound through the clarion
columns of every newspaper. Every State in the Union should know that
the Senate of Tennessee had organized as a court of impeachment, and the
name of Gwinnan should be the synonym of contumely. Upon his word, he
could hardly take in the vastness of the effrontery that emboldened the
member to acknowledge, to proclaim to this House, his gross, his sordid
personal motives, in attacking one of the most able, most respected,
most diligent, most upright, of the State judiciary. He appealed to the
higher feeling of the House. He begged that they would not be driven like
so many sheep into an investigation which was in its very inception an
insult, an outrage, and a scandal.
A member demanded from his seat if it were not an obligation imperatively
imposed upon the House to inquire into such a rumor, for the purpose of
ascertaining and eliciting the truth or falsehood it promulgated. Since
such a rumor was abroad, it behooved Judge Gwinnan’s friends to advocate
an investigation, for it was his only hope of vindication if he were
maligned.
Harshaw, leaning forward, both arms on his desk, attentively listening,
pursed up his red lips meditatively and nodded with abstracted
affirmation, as if pondering the position. He gave no outward expression
of gratulation, but he was quick to mark the accession of recruits to
his ranks. He could command a stalwart and callous fortitude. He could
receive without wincing, without anger, without shame, Kinsard’s jeers
and thrusts, for the sake of the aroused antagonism which seemed the
natural sequence of the young man’s insistent arguments.
“It specially becomes the House,” continued the member, “to countenance
no leniency in regard to dueling and all that pertains to it, after the
will of the people has been so unequivocally expressed in regard to the
matter of the challenge, or what was so construed, upon this floor.”
The member was rebuked here for infringement of parliamentary usage
in upbraiding, as it were, the previous actions of the House and
interrupting the member who had the floor.
Kinsard, restive under the interpolation, seized the opportunity to
resume. “There is no pretense of justification for adopting formal
resolutions to asperse the oath of an honorable man, least of all at the
instigation of his avowed personal enemy. The story we have heard is at
its worst merely a country boy’s ‘taking up a dare.’ I will venture to
say that there is not a man within the sound of my voice who has not had
similar affrays,—has not in the days of his youth ‘taken up a dare,’ has
not fought by appointment.”
“Will the member explain what he means by a duel?” demanded Harshaw. He
did not turn his big yellow head; he only cast his opaque blue eyes at
Kinsard, and once more looked down at his hands clasped on his desk.
For a moment Kinsard, taken unaware, was checked.
“Perhaps the member had best begin at the beginning, and define a
challenge,” suggested a satiric voice from the rear.
There was a sharp call to order from the chair, and Kinsard, rallying
himself, went tumultuously on.
“I am not a dictionary,” he proclaimed angrily. “I am not here to
enlighten your ignorance.”
Harshaw, elated by the allusion to the old question of the challenge,
intimating anew a flocking to his standard, interrupted cleverly: “I have
a dictionary right here,—a law dictionary.” He read aloud, “Dueling is
the fighting of two persons, one against another, at an appointed time
and place, on a precedent quarrel.”
Kinsard vociferously claimed the floor, although it had become very
evident to the House that the interest he advocated fared hardly less
severely at the hands of its friend than its foe. In debate he was no
match for the wily Harshaw,—his natural endowments, his enthusiasms, his
finer emotions, succumbing to a practiced logic, and a militant habit,
and an instinctive discernment of the vulnerable point.
“It is impossible to seriously maintain that a fight between a couple of
country boys is a duel,” he vehemently insisted. “Everybody knows that
the common acceptation of the idea of a duel is a combat between men—men
of station” (Harshaw leaned forward with an air of mock attention,
placing his hand ostentatiously behind his ear)—“on some question of
honor, fighting under the control and direction of their seconds, at a
specified number of paces, and with pistols”—
“Enactment provides that they shall be silver-mounted, hair-trigger?”
sneered Harshaw.
Once more there was a call to order. But Kinsard, badgered, turned at bay.
“I heard Judge Gwinnan tell you once that unless you kept out of his way
he would beat you with a stick, like a dog. How you do tempt the cur’s
deserts!”
Harshaw rose hastily to his feet. He stood for a moment, his head
lowered, his eyes flaming from under his knitted brows; he looked like
the champion mad bull of an arena, about to charge. Suddenly he turned,
and without a word resumed his seat. There was a storm of applause from
every quarter of the House. A dozen voices were crying that the offensive
words should be taken down; the clerk hastily obeyed; they were read
aloud, and the speaker called upon Kinsard to deny them or retract.
Kinsard could have said with all the fervor of truth that he was sorry
indeed, but it was in an inapplicable sense. He saw, with a sinking of
the heart, the havoc he was making in another’s fate,—the moral murder
that hung upon his hands. He looked about with despair at the faces
around him: they had been friendly, partisan, when he began to speak
against the motion; now they were reluctant, alienated, antagonistic.
It were better for Gwinnan had he had no friend but his own repute. The
impetuous young fellow felt that he had done the worst that was possible.
He would not now eat his words. He looked at Harshaw with an indignant
divination of his motives, when that gentleman, begging the indulgence
of the House, moved that the matter be dropped. He was not here to
maintain personal consequence. He was willing—nay, eager—to waive any
individual considerations which hindered the deliberations of the House
and the course of justice. If the member were so ungenerous as to decline
to apologize for words spoken in heat, confirming them in cool malice,
he himself was able to overlook them, the more as his character was, he
trusted, too favorably known to be injured by these reflections.
He sat down in the midst of a clamor from a number of eager occupants
of the floor,—one of whom the speaker presently recognized,—protesting
against the unparliamentary nature of the proposal. The objectionable
words were again read, and the speaker called upon Kinsard to apologize
or to deny them.
Perhaps Kinsard alone appreciated in this edifying demonstration
Harshaw’s policy. He could not be tempted to run counter. He would not
slack his pursuit of Gwinnan for another trail, however alluring. He
had higher game in view than the stripling’s insults could furnish. And
he had made himself an example of marvelous tolerance, forbearance, and
dignity.
Kinsard, lowering and pierced with all the barbed realization of futility
and defeat, adopted his words, refused to retract or apologize, and,
being commanded by the speaker to withdraw, took up his hat, and, with a
scornful, indifferent manner that angered every member as if charged with
a personal relation, strode out of the room.
Harshaw had followed his motions with narrowing eyelids. His attention
had relaxed with momentary exultation at this result. He was smiling a
little in his beard, and he glanced in a debonair preoccupation out of
the window near his seat. The sky was red, for the sun was going down. He
noted the flush with a casual eye, unprescient how it should be with him
when the day, fading now and dropping its dulling petals on every side,
should whitely bloom again. Then he reverted with zest to the proceedings
within.
Kinsard walked slowly along the portico to the flight of steps. A belt
of clouds, their edges glinting with gold, obscured the scarlet disk of
the sun, but from their lower verge a great glory of yellow light gushed
down, each of the multitudinous rays distinct, giving a fibrous effect,
upon the blue hills of the horizon, upon the city in the foreground. Here
and there they struck upon a spire or a tin roof that responded with a
glister fiercely white. The intervals showed soft shadows of restful
tints, the tops of the budding trees, the silver-gray shingles of an old
house, and here and there an open space where the renewed blue-grass
grew apace. It wore a dark richness all adown the slopes of the Capitol
hill. Somehow as he noted it there was borne upon him for the moment a
subtle intimation of the serenity of that life of Nature close to our
artificial existence,—mysterious, inevitable, quiescent. The contrast
gave a sharpened sense of the turmoils of his heart, the weariness of his
spirit, the rasping jars of his petty cares. He paused on the sidewalk
and looked about him. Then he produced a cigar, and took his way down
into the city.
He did not fear the sentence of the House. He was resolute in the
position he had taken, but he carried throughout the evening an
imperative sense of abeyance. He noticed with a secret scorn the clumsy
efforts of his legislative friends to sound his state of mind, when they
came down from the Capitol; he divined their fear of a collision, their
anxiety that the asperities with Harshaw should be allowed to quietly
drop. They sought to have him observe that they considered he had the
best of it, and that an apology now from him would mean merely a desire
to promote public interest. Only the age of another adviser—his father’s
friend as well as his own—restrained him from openly ridiculing the deep
satisfaction which this mentor evidently derived from the fact that
the young man’s mind would be occupied with lighter themes during the
evening, and he might forget the rancors of the debate. His thoughts,
however, were incongruous enough with the scene of a fashionable
wedding, where he officiated as an usher, and he paced the aisles of the
church with as mechanical a notice of his surroundings as a somnambulist.
His attention hardly pretermitted its hold upon the subject that had
absorbed him, and when again at liberty he went at once to his room at
the hotel, with a view of changing his dress to attend the night session
of the House.
It was the slightest matter that attracted his notice. He had lighted
the gas, and as he glanced into a drawer of the bureau some trivial
difference from the usual arrangement of his effects caught his eye.
He stood for a moment in motionless surprise. Perhaps it was accident,
perhaps his alert divination, but he slipped his hand beneath the pile
of garments and touched a wooden case of pistols. He flushed slightly,
and for a moment he was ashamed. He had doubted if it were still there.
He had thought that perhaps his cautious friends might have robbed him,
pending the time when he was in anger, of the means to do more than war
with words. He had taken instant fire at the idea of an interference with
his liberty. It was the smouldering embers of this thought that actuated
him rather than any serious expectation, but suddenly he turned back to
the bureau and lifted the case. He opened it slowly. It was empty. He
gazed at the vacant space, his eyes flashing, his cheek flushing. The
pistols had been abstracted and the case left that his attention might
not by its absence be directed to the weapons. He could easily divine all
of his friends’ arguments. He would not notice the disappearance of the
pistols, they must doubtless have said, unless he wanted them. He would
not want them unless he were intent upon some fatal folly. He could not
supply himself anew, for all the shops were closed, and by to-morrow he
would be in a cooler frame of mind.
His indignation was natural enough. He took heed, too, of contingencies
of which his anxious friends, accustomed to him always in the character
of assailant, lost sight. “I should be helpless,” he said, “if that man
should attack me. I should be incapable of self-defense.”
Suddenly he caught up a light spring overcoat, threw it over his arm,
and left the room. As he went down the staircase into the rotunda of
the hotel, he seemed the embodiment of handsome, gay, fortunate youth.
His cheek was flushed; his eyes were very brilliant. He paced up and
down the floor for a moment in front of the counter, for strangers were
registering their names and the clerks were busy. The fountain tossed up
its spray, and the tinkling drops fell into the basin; around it plants
were blooming. Somebody journeying from the South had presented the hotel
with a little alligator, that splashed about in the water and was a
source of diversion to the out-comers and in-goers, many of whom paused
to rouse it up with their canes and punch the head of the infant saurian.
Kinsard walked presently to the desk.
“I want to borrow a pistol,” he said to the clerk, to whom he was well
known.
The official, fancying that the guest contemplated a journey or a long
nocturnal drive into the country, and that the request was a matter
merely of precaution, turned with alacrity, took a pistol out of a
drawer, and laid it on the counter. He was looking for the cartridges,
when an acquaintance of Kinsard’s demanded casually, “What do you want a
gun for?”
Kinsard lifted his brilliant, reckless eyes. “To shoot Bob Harshaw,” he
declared.
The clerk turned hastily from his search and made a motion to clutch the
pistol.
Kinsard’s grasp had closed upon the handle.
“Man alive!” he cried angrily, “do you think I would use it except for
self-defense?”
He hastily thrust it into his pistol-pocket and went out into the night.
It was moonless and very dark, despite the myriads of scintillating
stars. The Capitol was visible only as suggested in the irradiations of
its great, flaring, yellow windows and the lights without on either side
of the long flight of steps. As Kinsard ascended he noticed on the broad
portico a group of men, separating at the moment, three of them going
within and one approaching the steps.
He could not fail to recognize Harshaw’s bluff manner, his portly figure,
his long, yellow beard, and his brisk, light step; and as the younger
man walked along the portico, Harshaw’s eyes, glancing out sharply
from under the brim of his slouch hat, identified him. There was no
one by to note how they should meet; the significance of the encounter
might have rejoiced the lovers of sensation. Kinsard was about to pass
without salutation, but Harshaw, whirling half round on his light heel,
paused, and with a bantering smile on his dimpled pink face showing in
the gaslight above their heads, “Great news!” he exclaimed. “They’ve
appointed a committee to investigate ‘the jedge’!”
Kinsard experienced a sharp pang of dismay for Gwinnan’s sake.
“And I suppose you are satisfied now,” he said, bitterly.
“Oh, no, my dear little sir. I am not half satisfied!” cried Harshaw,
with his liquid rotund laugh. His foreshortened shadow swayed on the
blocks of white limestone as if it could scarcely contain itself for
laughter.
He had lost the poise which he had endured so much to maintain that
day. He was intoxicated with his triumph; and indeed he could afford to
indulge it, for he felt that there was nothing now at stake.
“And that is the reason,” continued Harshaw, “that I feel I owe you an
obligation which I must not let pass without acknowledgment. In your able
and cogent speech this afternoon you did more to effect Judge Gwinnan’s
impeachment than, unaided, I could possibly have compassed. Let me beg
you to accept my thanks—ha! ha! ha!”
Deeply wounded by this thrust, and conscious of the injury he had done
Gwinnan’s interests, Kinsard turned upon him, but not without dignity.
“Mr. Harshaw,” he said, “if I believed you to be sincere in this matter,
if I thought you were not ingeniously perverting the facts and the law,
I should most willingly coöperate with you. But I know your motives to
be a rancorous jealousy and an insatiable spite. And if I have not done
anything to nullify them, it is not because I am without the will.”
He looked at his interlocutor from head to foot, as if he found a source
of surprise in his very embodiment.
“I cannot imagine how a soul so petty should be so corpulently lodged. It
might appropriately animate some tiny writhing worm that, showing venom,
could be crushed by a foot.”
“Look here, youngster,” said Harshaw, sneering and showing his strong
white teeth, his eyes gleaming under the brim of his hat, “I know you
mean you’d take my life if you could defy the consequence. But you’d
better mind how you go to extremes in Gwinnan’s service. I have a
contempt for you, but a pity, too. I know you are only his miserable
tool, his abject creature.”
Kinsard sprang forward with the suddenness of a tiger. A stinging thrill
ran through Harshaw’s face before he could realize that with an open palm
he had been struck upon the cheek.
It was the impulse of the moment,—he never could afterward explain it
to his will, he never could justify it to his policy; he was shocked
with an extreme surprise when the keen, abrupt tone of a pistol rang
upon the chill night air, and he became conscious that he was shaking a
smoking weapon in his right hand, jarred in some manner by the discharge.
The young man had flung himself upon him; he saw as in a dream Kinsard
take one convulsive step backward and fall from the verge of the great
portico to the stones below. There was a moment of intense silence.
Harshaw looked wildly to the doors, the windows, expecting the issuance
of startled men, roused from their deliberations. It was strange; if
the pistol-shot had been heard, it had doubtless been accounted some
violation of the law prohibiting target-practicing within the corporate
limits. Hardly a minute had elapsed when Harshaw ran down the long flight
to where the man lay, half in the shadow and half in the light, at the
foot of the stone wall.
“Are you hurt?” he cried in an agonized voice, as he bent over the
motionless figure. “Are you dead—already?”
He took one of the listless white hands,—very listless it was, and chill.
As he moved the submissive figure he felt the pistol in the pocket; he
drew it forth, glad at least that the man was armed. As he turned it
in his hands he saw in despair that it was unloaded. What theory of
self-defense could this bear? The next moment his quick eye noted that
the bore and make were the same as his own weapon’s. He slipped in a
cartridge, two, three, and replaced it in Kinsard’s pocket. Then he rose
to his feet to summon help. He turned as he was about to ascend the
steps, and looked back fearfully over his shoulder.
The sudden remembrance of his vision smote him. He gazed upon the scene
as if he had before beheld it. The man lay there at the foot of great
rocks, motionless and with an averted face.
He had braced himself as well as he might to endure the shock of
public reprehension, surprise, repulsion, reacting on his own nerves,
sensitive to every variation of popular opinion, when he should go to
his associates, his weapon in his hand, the report of his own foul deed
upon his lips. And yet, strong as he was, he faltered, he tottered, he
fell almost fainting against the door at which he entered. He had a vague
idea of the startled faces turned toward him, the expectant stillness,
the sound of his hoarse, disconnected words in an appalled staccato,
the sudden rush, the wild clamor. He hardly recognized the two men who
disengaged themselves from the turmoil and came to him,—the best friends
he had in the world, he might be sure now. He was only aware of what he
had said and how well he had said it, when he was supported between them
to a carriage, and was driving with them and with the officer who had
been summoned at his request, to the magistrate’s house. His friends were
talking together in respectful undertones of this “unfortunate affair,”
and arranging the details,—a little complicated because of the late
hour,—that there might be naught more unseemly than giving speedy bail.
Neither intruded on his reserve. The officer was silent, unofficial,
respectfully null, effaced. The stars were bright in the dark sky. The
horses’ hoofs flashed fire.
The magistrate, roused to the fact that justice may not sleep when
wrongs are to be righted, made the necessary inquiries in so grave and
courteous a tone that it seemed he recognized that the occasional killing
of a gentleman may be lamentable to the deceased and inconvenient to the
surviving, but was nothing to unduly stretch the limits of his elastic
impartiality and abeyance of harsh opinion. He promptly accepted the
proffered bail, and Harshaw’s friends left him only at his bedroom door,
where they shook hands gravely and kindly with him, and in response to
some muttered thanks declared they proposed to see him through.
He found beneath the door the cards and notes of other friends who,
hearing some wild rumor of the trouble, had called to proffer services.
His lips curled triumphantly as he scanned them one by one. They
represented the estimation in which he was held. They intimated a
reliance on his good faith and motive in any deed.
“But I tell you, Mr. Harshaw,” he said ceremoniously to himself, “’twould
have been mighty different if ’twasn’t for your own smartness!” For he
could hardly thank his craft enough for the timely expedient of slipping
the cartridges into Kinsard’s empty pistol.
He slept badly in the earlier part of the night, but toward day he fell
into a deep and dreamless slumber, and woke refreshed. It was later
than usual, and he was solitary at breakfast save for the company of
strangers. The corridors were well-nigh deserted when he came out with
his unfolded newspaper in his hand,—he would not look at it earlier.
Most of the members who sojourned at the same hotel had gone to the
Capitol. The reading-rooms were quite empty, but for the presence of
the sunlight in glittering white blocks upon the carpet. He had lighted
a cigar and flung himself into a chair, nerving himself to read the
accounts of the shooting and the comments, when suddenly one of his
bondsmen came into the room with so precipitate a manner, so perturbed
a face, that the trouble so cleverly manipulated assumed anew an
indefinitely threatening aspect. He felt his muscles tighten, his pulses
quicken as he asked hastily, “What’s up?”
He could not mistake the nature of the look the man bent on him; it made
him tingle from head to foot. And yet his errand was the last offices of
friendship.
“You’re too quick on the trigger in more ways than one, Harshaw,” he
said. “Kinsard was not hit.”
If Harshaw’s conscience had suffered one pang, this announcement might
have weighed more with him than all that was to come. The extreme
surprise told only on his nerves: his heart thumped heavily; his breath
was short, his face flushed; he looked at his interlocutor with eyes that
seemed lidless in their intentness.
“Kinsard was not shot. He lost his balance and was stunned by the fall.
They have been working with him all night long, but the doctor says he’ll
pull through now.” The man faltered a little. It was hard to look into
another man’s eyes and say this. “He revived once before you left. He saw
you in the gaslight load his pistol with your cartridges. And then he
fainted again. I thought I’d tell you. The whole town’s talking.”
It was admirably managed,—Harshaw’s long, amazed stare, the slow rising
from the chair, the rotund resonant laughter filling the room. It renewed
his friend’s faith in him.
“Lie, eh?” he asked anxiously.
“Go away!” Harshaw bluffly waved him off. “I’m done with you. Coming to
_Me_ with a cock-and-bull story like this,—the visions a stunned man saw
between his faints!”
As he took his way boldly down into the rotunda amongst the crowds
of men assembled there, the effect of his presence, his manner, his
bluff hilarious voice as he canvassed the story, did much to annul its
credibility, in fact might have destroyed it but for the recollection of
the clerk’s declaration—silently pondered—that the pistol loaned was new,
had never been discharged; that the box of cartridges was unopened in his
possession; that Kinsard went straight from him to the Capitol; that the
shooting occurred within fifteen minutes.
The subtle perception of this mental reservation had no influence on
Harshaw’s capable swagger and burly ridicule, but as he noted it he
was saying again and again to himself, “You’re a mighty smart man, Bob
Harshaw. You’re just a little mite _too_ smart. There’s no mistake this
time. It is you who are dead—politically as dead as Hector.”
No action was taken in the matter by the legislature, for it bristled
with unprecedented difficulties. The session was drawing to a close,
and Harshaw’s term ceased with it. His usefulness ceased previously.
Whatever measures he had advocated were tainted with suspicion and
encountered disfavor. Bereft of the influences of his enmity toward
Judge Gwinnan, the committee appointed to investigate the charges
against him deliberated, and dawdled, and finally reported adversely to
the resolution to prefer articles of impeachment. Their doubt of the
jurisdiction of the legislature was said to be the determining cause of
their action. It was a perplexed and a troublous question. And thus they
washed their hands of it.
It had been in this cause that Harshaw had flung himself away, and it was
in this result that he experienced the extremest rigors of defeat. It
added to the helpless chagrin with which he watched his future, coming on
so fast that already its coarsened grotesque features were wearing the
immediate aspect of the present. A fine contrast he was, to be sure, to
the man whose seat on the bench he had sought to shake, still serenely
immovable, while he, the loiterer about the tavern at Shaftesville,
beginning to drink heavily now, although his habits had been temperate,
telling idle stories to the other loiterers with the zestful skill
acquired as a politician, useless now, must needs watch all the interests
that he had spent his life to conserve dwindle by degrees, till, case
after case withdrawn from him, he should become a mere hanger-on in those
courts in which he had aspired to preside.
And then there came to him news for which he felt he had no commensurate
capacity for astonishment. Gwinnan, aggrieved by the indecision of the
legislature, was clamoring for a vindication. It was nominally at the
relation of a third party that the attorney-general brought a suit in
the chancery court to test his title to office; and in the interval
before the trial Mr. Harshaw had a great deal to say about judicial
whitewashing, and speculated much concerning the probable result of
the case, and pondered deeply on Gwinnan’s motives in encountering its
hazards.
Sometimes he was half minded to accredit their probity, and then,
ambitious of all that may serve to lift, he fell envious again, and
railed at his harsh penalty, that, being not all base, one crafty
deed—sequence of how many crafty thoughts!—should determine his future
and affix his life sentence.