The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed to
the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the field,
and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast. Then,
returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward through the
next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was a continuation
of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment. The track, raggedly
defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in a direction which
indicated that its terminus might be the switch where the empty cars had
stood last night, waiting for the one-o'clock freight. Though the fields
had been trampled down in many places by the searching parties, he felt
sure of the direction taken by the Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that
the searchers had mistaken the tracks he followed for those of earlier
parties in the hunt. On the embankment he saw a number of men, walking
west and examining the ground on each side, and a long line of people
following them out from town. He stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-
Roads in his hand and he knew it.
He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads, and
that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the Cross-
Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of his
knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the men near
him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive. They would
not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as a prisoner; such
a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also, they were not that
kind; they had been "looking for him" a long time, and their one idea was
to kill him.
And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe
believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one
thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and
whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality, there
was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed before
the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads "White-Cap" could have been laid upon
him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who knew him
well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an untitled
Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He was the only man
the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as "Marse" since he came
to Plattville, thirty years ago.
Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages, in
the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number they
had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of the
young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly in a
trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge up in his
breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long
retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a
serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness
that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their
long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out
the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over
to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the law could strike and the
innocent and the hotheaded be spared from suffering. He would wait; he
would lay his information before the sheriff; and Horner would go quietly
with a strong posse, for he would need a strong one. He began to retrace
his steps.