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“What became of that letter?”

“I got it. Want to see it?”

“Yes.”

Bud felt in his pockets as if looking for something, and then, with an expression as if he had suddenly remembered, remarked:

“No, I ain’t got none. They stole my knife when they ‘rested me.” Then facing the courtroom, he added: “Somebody lend me a knife, and pass me my hat over there ‘longside them sheriffs.”

The court-crier took the hat from one of the deputies, and the clerk, in answer to a nod of assent from the Judge, passed Bud an ink-eraser with a steel blade in one end.

The audience now had the appearance of one watching a juggler perform a trick. Bud grasped the hat in one hand, turned back the brim, inserted the point of the knife between the hat lining and the hat itself and drew out a yellow envelope stained with dirt and perspiration.

“Here it is. I ain’t opened it, and what’s more, they didn’t find it when they searched me;” and he looked again toward the deputies.

The Judge leaned forward in his seat and said:

“Hand me the letter.”

The letter was passed up by the court-crier, every eye following it. His Honor examined the envelope, and, beckoning to Halliday, said:

“Is this your letter?”

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.