_ CHAPTER XXIII. THE STATE VS. DIEUDONNE LANE
Judge Henderson, haggard, shaken, turned and walked down one of the halls which traversed the courthouse building. In the central space, where the two halls crossed at right angles, was a curving stair leading up to the courtrooms and the offices of the immediate servants of justice. As he stood here he saw again the tall figure of Horace Brooks approaching. He walked even more stooped forward than was usually his case, shambling, his feet turned out at wide angles. His great face in its fringe of red beard hung forward--but it bore now nothing but smiles. It showed nothing of triumph over the man he saw standing here waiting, humble and broken. He himself had said that he lacked birth and breeding. If so, whence got he this strange gentleness which marked his face now, as he stepped up to Judge Henderson--the man who but now had stood between him and success--who must always, so long as he lived, stand between him and happiness--the man whom he had beaten?
"Judge," said Horace Brooks, "I reckon about the best thing we can do is to go right on up to the court and get this thing cleaned up. You've heard the news by now?"
Henderson nodded. "Yes, just now."
"Well, that softens up a lot of things, doesn't it? It will make things easier for everyone concerned--a whole lot easier for you and me, Judge. Now we can ask for the quashing of this indictment and the court can't help granting it. Cowles is there. He's just gone up. Adamson is with him."
So they went up before the court, and the judge listened to the story of the sad-faced officer and the sad-faced old man with him. And presently the clerk at his side inscribed in the records: "The State vs. Dieudonne Lane, murder in the first degree. Indictment quashed on motion of Assistant State's Attorney."
"You will discharge the prisoner from custody, Mr. Sheriff," said the judge.
"I'd like to say, if it please the Court," said Cowles, drawing a large and adequate handkerchief from his pocket and blowing a large and adequate nose, "that last night, at the time of the--the disturbance which these gentlemen here helped me to quell--this same young man that's just been discharged--why, he helped me as much as anybody."
"What do you mean?" demanded the judge severely. "You let him out of your custody when he was under commitment?"
"Yes, your Honor. I may have been short in some of my duties, your Honor. I let a woman--a young woman--go in there last night to see him for a few minutes. When she went out I must have forgot to lock the door. What they said, now, it must have stirred me up some way. When the mob formed and came to the jail the prisoner had walked out. But right at the worst of it, there he was. And after it he went on back to jail alone. When I got back he was in his cell. The door wasn't locked even then. My wife wasn't there.
"I reckon, your Honor, we've all of us sort of made a general mistake," concluded Dan Cowles deprecatingly. "I allowed I'd tell this Court about it."
So, amid the frowning silence of the court, and the silence as well of all who heard this, the two attorneys, the sheriff and Ephraim Adamson walked on down the winding stairs.
Adamson saw coming across the courthouse yard the figure of an angular woman, dressed in calico, a sun-bonnet on her head, a sodden handkerchief in her hand. He walked on hurriedly to meet her. At the very spot where so lately he and his son had stood to challenge the world to combat, he took this gaunt old woman in his arms, in the sunlight before all the world. "Mother!" said he.
And at about this same time--since after all the world and life and swift keen joy of living must go on just the same--two young persons stood not far distant from that scene; stood not in the full light of the sun, stood not in the wisdom and sadness of middle age, but in youth--in youth and the glory and splendor of the vast, ineffable, indispensable illusion. The dim twilight which lighted them might have been the soft, vague light of the world's own dawning--the same which poor Miss Julia had seen that very day.
Cowles hastened away from the door after he had thrown back the bolts--the bolts and bars which had been laughed at by love all this time. The young man came out into the stone-floored hall where Anne Oglesby stood waiting for him--all beautiful and fresh and clean and sweet--fragrant as a very flower in her worthiness for love.
"Don!" she said, and held out her arms, running toward him.
"Oh, Anne! Anne!"
His arms went about her. And this time there was no one there to see. _