“He may want to make a bargain with us,” Garner's eyes seemed to say, but Carson's mind had grasped other and more dire possibilities as he recalled Blackburn's remark of a few minutes before. In fact all those assurances of good-will might mean naught else than that the sheriff--at the instigation of Wiggin and others--had come actually to arrest him as the leader of the men who had intimidated the county jailer and stolen away the State's prisoner. The thought seemed to be borne telepathically to Garner, for that worthy all at once sat more rigidly, more aggressively defiant in his chair, and the pen he was chewing was suspended before his lips. This beating about the bush, in serious things, at least, was not Garner's method. “Well, well, Braider,” he said, with a change of tone and manner, “tell us right out what you want. The day is passing and we've got lots to do.” “All right, all right,” agreed the intoxicated man; “here goes. Boys, what I'm going to say is a sort of per-personal matter. You've both treated me like a respectable citizen and officer of the law, and I've taken it just as if I fully deserved the honor. But Jeff Braider ain't no hypocrite, if he _is_ a politician and hobnobs with that sort of riffraff. Boys, always, away down at the bottom of everything I ever did tackle in this life, has been the memory of my old mother's teachings, and I've tried my level best, as a man, to live up to 'em. I don't know as I ever come nigh committing crime--as I regard it--till here lately. Crime, they tell me, stalks about in a good many disguises. The crime I'm talking about had two faces to it. You could look at it one way and it would seem all right, and then from another side it would look powerful bad. Well, I first saw this thing the night the mob raided Neb Wynn's shanty and run Pete Warren out and chased him to your house, Carson. You may not want to look me in the eye ag'in, my boy, when I tell you, but I could have come to your aid a sight quicker that night than I did if I hadn't been loaded down with so many fears of injury to myself. As I saw that big mob rushing like a mad river after that nigger, I said to myself, I did, that no human power or authority could save 'im anyway, and that if I stood up before the crowd and tried to quiet them, that--well, if I wasn't shot dead in my tracks I'd kill myself politically, and so I waited in the edge of the crowd, hiding like a sneak-thief, till--till you did the work, and then I stepped up as big as life and pretended that I'd just arrived.” “Oh!” Garner exclaimed, and he stared at the bowed head of the officer with a look of wonder in his eyes; and it was a look of hope, too, for surely no human being of exactly _this_ stamp would take unfair advantage of any one.