He realized, with black chagrin, that as long as he had sat there steadfastly calm, he had been to Asa a tower of strength--but that when he had broken out he had forfeited that privilege--and left his kinsman unsuccoured. At last the Commonwealth closed, and Asa himself came to the stand. Had he been possessed of a lawyer's experience he could hardly have evaded more skilfully the snares set in his path, as with imperturbable gallantry he met his skilled hecklers. The even calmness of his velvety eyes became a matter of newspaper report, and when he had finished his direct testimony and had been turned over to the enemy, the fashion in which he cared for himself also found its way into the news columns. Asa kept before him the realization that he had been advertised as a "bad man" and an assassin. Just now he was intent upon impressing the jury with his urbane proof against exasperation, even when the invective of insinuation mounted to ferocity, "You have known the witness, Saul Fulton, for years, have you not?" demanded the cross-examiner. "I've known him all my life." "Can you state any motive he should have for offering malicious and false evidence against you?" "Any reason for his lyin'?" The prisoner gazed at the barking attorney with a calm seriousness and replied suavely: "No, sir, only that he's swearin' to save his own neck from the rope--an' thet's a right pithy reason, I reckon." Yet all the while that he was making his steep, uphill fight, Asa was feeling a secret disquiet growing to an obsession within him. He could not forget that some one upon whose reassurance he had leaned had been banished from that place where his enemies were bent upon his undoing. He felt as if the red lantern had been quenched on a dangerous crossing--and the psychology of the thing gnawed at his overtried nerves. Boone's freckled face and wide blue eyes had seemed to stand for serenity, where all else was hectic and fevered. To Asa, that intangible yet tranquillizing support had meant what the spider meant to Bruce, and now it had been taken from him. The bearded attorney who had destroyed defendant after defendant was battering at him, with the massed artillery of vindictive and unremitting aggressiveness. For a long while Asa fenced warily--coolly, remembering that to slip the curb upon his temper meant ruin, but as assault followed assault, through hours, his senses began to reel, his surety began to weaken, and his eyes began to see red. The attorney who was scourging him with the whips of law saw the first break in his armour and bored into it, with ever-increasing vindictiveness. Into Asa's mind flashed a picture of the cabin back home, of the wife suffering an agony of anxiety; of the baby whom he might never again see. He seemed groping with his gaze for the steadying eyes of the boy, who was no longer there--whom he desperately needed.