Halliday stepped to the side of the Judge, fingered the letter closely,
and said: "Looks like my writin'."
"Open it and see."
Halliday broke the seal with his thumb-nail, and took out half a sheet
of note-paper closely written on one side, wrapped about a small
picture-card.
"Yes, it's my letter;" and he glanced sheepishly around the room and
hung his head, his face scarlet.
The Judge leaned back in his chair, raised his hand impressively, and
said gravely:
"This case is adjourned until ten o'clock tomorrow."
Two days later I again met the Warden as he was entering the main door
of the jail. He had been over to the Court-house, he said, helping the
deputy along with a new "batch of moonshiners."
"What became of Bud Tilden?" I asked.
"Oh, he got it in the neck for robbin' the mails, just's I told you he
would. Peached on himself like a d---- fool and give everything dead
away. He left for Kansas this morning. Judge give him twenty years."
He is still in the lock-step at Leavenworth prison. He has kept it up
now for two years. His hair is short, his figure bent, his step
sluggish. The law is slowly making an animal of him--that wise,
righteous law which is no respecter of persons.
III
"ELEVEN MONTHS AND TEN DAYS"
It was a feeble old man of seventy-two this time who sat facing the
jury, an old man with bent back, scant gray hair, and wistful,
pleading eyes.
He had been arrested in the mountains of Kentucky and had been brought
to Covington for trial, chained to another outlaw, one of those
"moonshiners" who rob the great distilleries of part of their profits
and the richest and most humane Government on earth of part of
its revenue.
For eleven months and ten days he had been penned up in one of the steel
cages of Covington jail.
I recognized him the moment I saw him.
He was the old fellow who spoke to me from between the bars of his den
on my visit the week before to the inferno--the day I found Samanthy
North and her baby--and who told me then he was charged with "sellin'"
and that he "reckoned" he was the oldest of all the prisoners about him.
He had on the same suit of coarse, homespun clothes--the trousers hiked
up toward one shoulder from the strain of a single suspender; the
waistcoat held by one button; the shirt open at the neck, showing the
wrinkled throat, wrinkled as an old saddle-bag, and brown, hairy chest.
Pie still carried his big slouch hat, dust-begrimed and frayed at the
edges. It hung over one knee now, a red cotton handkerchief tucked under
its brim. He was superstitious about it, no doubt; he would wear it when
he walked out a free man, and wanted it always within reach. Hooked in
its band was a trout-fly, a red ibis, some souvenir, perhaps, of the
cool woods that he loved, and which brought back to him the clearer the
happy, careless days which might never be his again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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