第128章 The Ancient Law (22)

"Take this and buy a ticket somewhere.It's the money I scraped up to pay Fred Turner.""To pay Fred Turner?" echoed Will, as if in that lay the significance of the remark.

"Take it and buy a ticket, and when you get where you're going, sit still and keep your mouth shut.If you wear a bold face you will go scot--free; remember that; but everything depends upon your keeping a stiff front.And now go--through the back door and past the kitchen to the piece of woods beyond the pasture.Cut through them to Tanner's Station and take the train there, mind, for the North."With a short laugh he held out his big, knotted hand.

"Good--by," he said, " and don't be a damned fool.""Good--by," answered Will, clinging desperately to his outstretched arm.Then an ashen pallor overspread his face, and he slunk nervously toward the kitchen, for there was the sound of footsteps on the little porch outside, followed by a brisk rap on the front door.

"Go!" whispered Christopher, hardly taking breath, and he stood waiting while Will ran along the wooden platform and past the stable toward the pasture.

The rap came again, and he turned quickly."Quit your racket and let me get on my clothes!" he shouted, and hesitated a little longer.

As he stood alone there in the center of the room, his eyes, traversing the walls, fell on the portrait of Bolivar Blake, and with one of the fantastic tricks of memory there shot into his head the dying phrase of that gay sinner: "I may not sit with the saints, but I shall stand among the gentlemen.""Precious old ass!" he muttered, and unbarred the door.

As he flung it open the first rays of sunlight splashed across the threshold, and he was conscious, all at once, of a strange exhilaration, as if he were breasting one of the big waves of life.

"This is a pretty way to wake up a fellow who has been planting tobacco till he's stiff," he grumbled."Is that you, Tom?" He glanced carelessly round, nodding with a kind of friendly condescension to each man of the little group."How are you, Matthew? Hello, Fred!"Tom drew back, coughing, and scraped the heel of his boot on the topmost step.

"We didn't mean to git you out of bed, Mr.Christopher," he explained apologetically, "but the truth is we want Will Fletcher an' he ain't at home.The old man's murdered, suh.""Murdered, is he?" exclaimed Christopher, with a long whistle, "and you want Will Fletcher--which shows what a very pretty sheriff you would make.Well, if you're so strong on his scent that you can't turn aside, most likely you'll find him sleeping off his drunk under my haystack.But if you're looking for the man who killed Bill Fletcher, then that's a different matter,?

he added, taking down his hat, "and I reckon, boys, I'm about ready to come along."CHAPTER X.The Wheel of Life Throughout the trial he wore the sullen reserve which closed over him like a visor when he approached one of the crises of life.He had made his confession and he stood to it."I killed Bill Fletcher" he gave out flatly enough.What he could not give was an explanation of his unaccountable presence at the Hall so nearly upon midnight.When the question was first put to him he sneered and shrugged his shoulders with the hereditary gesture of the Blakes."Why was he there? Well, why wasn't he there?" That was all.And Carraway, who had stood by his side since the day of the arrest, retired at last before an attitude which he characterised as one of defiant arrogance.

It was this attitude, people said presently, rather than the murder of Bill Fletcher, which brought him the sentence he heard with so insolent an indifference.

"Five years wasn't much for killin' a man, maybe," Tom Spade observed, "but it was a good deal, when you come to think of it, for a Blake to pay jest for gettin' even with a Fletcher.Why, he might have brained Bill Fletcher an' welcome," the storekeeper added a little wistfully, "if only he hadn't put on such a nasty manner afterward."But it was behind this impregnable reserve that Christopher retreated as into a walled fortress.There had been no sentiment in his act, he told himself; he had not even felt the romantic fervour of the sacrifice.A certain staunch justice was all he saw in it, relieved doubtless by a share of his hereditary love of desperate hopes--of the hot--headed clinging to that last shifting foothold on which a man might still make his fight against the power of circumstance.And so, with that strange mixture of rustic crudeness and aristocratic arrogance, he turned his face from his friends and went stubbornly through the cross-questioning of the court.