s in the crowd. The
lawyer was white, as with wrath. The judges gestured to the officers
and left the bench. The court was cleared. As he was led away,
Guayos looked once more at the palms, and half smiled as a breath of
freshened air came in at the window. Palms! Where had he been told of
them? What did they mean? Had they not somewhere, in some far land,
been waved in victory when One innocent was about to suffer? Were
not palms awarded in another world to the meek and the honest who
had been despitefully used in this?
Last to leave the room was Morelos. He had remained, seated at a
table, biting a pen, fingering some papers, gazing abstractedly at
the vacant bench. The whoop of a barefooted, black-faced urchin in
the corridor roused him. With a scowl and a shrug he slowly resumed
his hat and went to his home by a roundabout way.
Priests called daily at the prison. Guayos made no appeal, asked for
no delay. The loyalists were clamoring for an example that should
stay the revolution. In a week the condemned man was hanged. An
odd thing happened at the execution: the rope had slipped a little,
and the knot, working toward the front, had left an impress there
after the body was cut down, as of two crossed fingers. The friends
of Guayos held this to be a sign of grace.
Now, if there were any in the world to pray for the peace of a human
soul, it was not the soul of Guayos that asked it. He had affirmed his
innocence to the end, had been shrived, had gone to the gallows with
a dauntless tread, and there were palm branches on his coffin. But
the lawyer? In a month after the trial white hairs appeared among
his locks, hitherto as black as coal. He grew gray and dry in his
complexion, his shoulders began to stoop, his eyes lost their clearness
and boldness, his mouth was no longer firm. Often he wore a harried,
hunted look. Yet they said he was growing softer in his humor, that
he oftener went to church, that he gave more for charity than other
men of his means, and that if the widow Guayos did not know from whom
the five hundred pesetas came that a messenger left at her home one
night the neighbors pretended to. Don Morelos became an object of a
wider interest than he knew. Even the boys in the street would point
as he passed, with head bent and hands clasped behind his back, and
whisper, "There goes El Citado" (the cited), and among the commoners
he was known as well by that name as by the one his parents had given
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