the reporters raised one finger each--It
meant that the verdict was death.

CHAPTER XIV

As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the
afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the
platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away
from a finished chapter.

The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears,
usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for
service.

Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned
to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own
tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing
under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.

Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies,
and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of
swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the
cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the
farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her
grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.

McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the
convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this
impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of
its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now
he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his
sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the
face of his youthful protege began to lighten. Boone was as yet too
young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of
his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must
break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut--and dual. Asa's "woman" must
have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be
wrung from its stinted productivity--and he must put behind him that
ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned
to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.

One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house,
knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of
frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first
raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.

But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sigh