t night
and had reached Lowville early the next day. He had found his mother
there safe and his aunt and even Cassius Bascom, but had been
horrified to learn that Ruth Lansing had turned back into the face of
the fire in an effort to find and bring back the Bishop of Alden. No
word had been had of either of them. He had told his mother exactly
what had happened in the hills. He had been ready to kill the man. He
had wished to do so. But another had fired before he did. He had not,
in fact, used his gun at all. She had believed him implicitly, of
course. Why should she not? If he had actually shot the man he would
have told her that just as exactly and truthfully. But Jeffrey was
aware that she was the only person who did or would believe him.

He was just on the point of mounting one of his mother's horses, to go
up into the lower hills in the hope of finding Ruth wandering
somewhere, when he was placed under arrest for the murder of Rogers.
The two men who had escaped down the line of the chain had gotten
quickly to a telegraph line and had made their report. The railroad
people had taken their decision and had acted on the instant. The
warrant was ready and waiting for Jeffrey before he even reached
Lowville.

When he had been taken out of his own county and brought before the
Grand Jury in Racquette County, he realised that any hope he might
have had for a trial on the moral merits of the case was thereby lost.
Unless he could find and actually produce that other man, whoever he
was, who had fired the shot, his own truthful story was useless. His
own friends who had been there at hand would not believe his oath.

His mother and Ruth Lansing sat in court in the front seats just to
the right of him. From time to time he turned to smile reassuringly at
them with a confidence that he was far from feeling. His mother
smiled back through glistening grey eyes, all the while marking with a
twinge at her heart the great sharp lines that were cutting deep into
the big boyish face of her son. Mostly she was thinking of the
morning, just a few months ago when her little boy, suddenly and
unaccountably grown to the size of a tall man, had been obliged to
lift up her face to kiss her. He was going down into the big world, to
conquer it and bring it home for her. With that boyish forgetfulness
of everything but his own plans of conquest, which is at once the
pride and the heart-stab of every mother with her man child, he had
ki