HE young men pretended to be deeply absorbed over their work when the stalwart officer loomed up in the doorway, his broad-brimmed hat well back on his head, the flush of intoxicants in his tanned face, his step unsteady.

“I hope I won't disturb you, gentlemen,” he said; “but you are two men that I want to talk to—I might say talk to as a brother.”

“Come in, come in, Braider,” Carson said; “take that chair.”

As Braider moved with uncertain step to a chair, tilted it to one side to divest it of its burden of books, newspapers, and old briefs and other defunct legal documents, Garner with a wary look in his eye fished a solitary cigar from his pocket—the one he had reserved for a mid-day smoke—and prof-ered it.

“Have a cigar,” he said, “and make yourself comfortable.”

The sheriff took the cigar as absent-mindedly as he would, in his condition, have received a large banknote, and held it too tightly for its preservation in his big red hand.

“Yes, I want to talk to you boys, and I want to say a whole lot that I hope won't go any further. I've always meant well by you two, and hoped fer your success both in the law—and politics.”

Garner cast an amused glance, in spite of the gravity of the situation, at his partner, and then said, quite evenly, “We know that, Braider—we always have known it.”

“Well, as I say, I want to talk to you. I've heard that an honest confession is good for the soul, if not for the pocket, and I'm here to make one, as honest as I kin spit it out.”

“Oh, that's it?” said Garner, and with a wary look of curiosity on his face he sat waiting.

“Yes, and I want to begin back at the first and sort o' lead up. It's hard to keep a fellow's political leaning hid, Carson, and I reckon you may have heard that I had some notion of casting my luck in with Wiggin.”

“After he began circulating those tales about me, yes,” Carson said, with a touch of severity; “not before, Braider—at least not when I worked as I did the last time for your own election.”

“You are plumb right,” the sheriff said, readily enough. “I flopped over sudden, I'll acknowledge; but that's neither here nor there.” He paused for a moment and the lawyers exchanged steady glances.

“He may want to make a bargain with us,” Garner's eyes seemed to say, but Carson's mind had grasped other and more dire possibilities as he recalled Blackburn's remark of a few minutes before. In fact all those assurances of good-will might mean naught else than that the sheriff—at the instigation of Wiggin and others—had come actually to arrest him as the leader of the men who had intimidated the county jailer and stolen away the State's prisoner. The thought seemed to be borne telepathically to Garner, for that worthy all at once sat more rigidly, more aggressively defiant in his chair, and the pen he was chewing was suspended before his lips. This beating about the bush, in serious things, at least, was not Garner's method.

“Well, well, Braider,” he said, with a change of tone and manner, “tell us right out what you want. The day is passing and we've got lots to do.”

“All right, all right,” agreed the intoxicated man; “here goes. Boys, what I'm going to say is a sort of per-personal matter. You've both treated me like a respectable citizen and officer of the law, and I've taken it just as if I fully deserved the honor. But Jeff Braider ain't no hypocrite, if he is a politician and hobnobs with that sort of riffraff. Boys, always, away down at the bottom of everything I ever did tackle in this life, has been the memory of my old mother's teachings, and I've tried my level best, as a man, to live up to 'em. I don't know as I ever come nigh committing crime—as I regard it—till here lately. Crime, they tell me, stalks about in a good many disguises. The crime I'm talking about had two faces to it. You could look at it one way and it would seem all right, and then from another side it would look powerful bad. Well, I first saw this thing the night the mob raided Neb Wynn's shanty and run Pete Warren out and chased him to your house, Carson. You may not want to look me in the eye ag'in, my boy, when I tell you, but I could have come to your aid a sight quicker that night than I did if I hadn't been loaded down with so many fears of injury to myself. As I saw that big mob rushing like a mad river after that nigger, I said to myself, I did, that no human power or authority could save 'im anyway, and that if I stood up before the crowd and tried to quiet them, that—well, if I wasn't shot dead in my tracks I'd kill myself politically, and so I waited in the edge of the crowd, hiding like a sneak-thief, till—till you did the work, and then I stepped up as big as life and pretended that I'd just arrived.”

“Oh!” Garner exclaimed, and he stared at the bowed head of the officer with a look of wonder in his eyes; and it was a look of hope, too, for surely no human being of exactly this stamp would take unfair advantage of any one.

“That was the first time,” Braider gulped, as he went on, his glance now directed solely to Carson. “My boy, I went to bed that night, after we jailed that nigger, feeling meaner than an egg-sucking dog looks when he's caught in the act. If there is anything on earth that will shame a man it is to see another display more moral and physical courage than he does, and you did enough of both that night to show me where I stood. It was a new thing to me, and it made me mad. I was a good soldier in the war—I wear a Confederate veteran's badge that was pinned onto my coat in public by the " beautiful daughter of a dead comrade—but being shot at in a bunch ain't the same as being the only target, and I showed my limit.”

“Oh, you are exaggerating the whole thing,” Carson said, with a flush of embarrassment.

“No I ain't, Carson Dwight,” Braider said, feelingly, and he took out his red cotton handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “You showed me that night the difference between bravery, so-called, and the genuine thing. I reckon bravery for personal gain is a weak imitation of bravery that acts just out of human pity as yours did that night. Well, that ain't all. The next day I was put to a worse test than ever. It was noised about, you know, that a bigger mob than the first was rising. I stayed out of the centre of town as much as I could, for everywhere I went folks would look at me as if they thought I'd surely do something to protect the prisoner, and at home my wife was whimpering around all day, saying she was sure Pete was innocent, or enough so to deserve a trial, if not for himself for the sake of his mammy and daddy. But what was such a wavering thing as I was to do? I took it that seventy-five per cent, of the men who had backed me with their ballot in my election was bent on lynching the prisoner, and if I opposed them they would consider me a traitor. On the other hand, I was up against this: if I did put up a feeble sort of opposition and gave in easy under pressure, the conservative men, like some we have here in town, would say I didn't mean business or I'd have actually opened fire on the mob. You see, boys, I wasn't man enough to take a stand either way, and though I well knew what was coming, I went about lying like a dog—lying in my throat, telling everybody that the indications showed that the excitement had quieted down. I went home that night and told my wife all was serene, and I drank about a quart of rye whiskey to keep me from thinking about the business and went to bed, but my conscience, I reckon, was stronger than my whiskey, for I rolled and tumbled all night. It seemed to me that I was, with my own hands, tying the rope around that pore nigger's neck. There I lay, a sworn officer of the law, flat on my back with not enough moral courage in my miserable carcass to have killed a gnat. Carson, if I saw you once before my eyes that long night, I saw you five hundred times. Your speech rang over and over in my ears. I saw you stand there when a ball had already grazed your brow and defy them to shoot again. I saw that poor black boy clinging to your knees, and knew that the light of Heaven had shone on you, while I lay in the hot darkness of the bottomless pit.”

“God, you do put it strong!” Garner exclaimed.

“I'm not putting it half strong enough,” the sheriff went on. “I don't deserve to hold office even in a community half run by mob law. But I ain't through. I ain't through yet. I got up early that awful morning, and went out to feed my hogs at a pen that stands on a back street, and there a woman milking a cow told me that it was over Pete Warren was done for—guilty or not, he was done for. I went in the house and tried to gulp down my breakfast, faced by my wife, who wouldn't speak to me, and showed in other ways what she thought about the whole thing. She was eternally sighing and going on about old Mammy Lindy and her feelings. I first went to the jail, and there I was told that two mobs had come, the first the Hillbend crowd, who did the work, and the bigger mob that got there too late.”

Braider's voice had grown husky and he coughed. Garner stole a searching glance of inquiry at Carson, but Dwight, his face suffused with a warm look of pity for the speaker, was steadily staring through the open door.

“I ain't done yet, God knows I ain't,” the sheriff gulped. “That morning I felt meaner than any convict that ever wore ball and chain. If I'd been tried and found guilty of stabbing a woman in the back I don't believe I could have felt less like a man. I tried to throw it all off by thinking that I couldn't have done any good anyway, but it wouldn't work. Carson, you and your plucky stand for the maintenance of law was before me, and you wasn't paid for the work while I was. Huh! do you remember seeing me as you came out of Blackburn's store that morning, with your hair all tousled up and your eyes looking red and bloodshot?”

“Yes, I remember seeing you,” said Dwight. “I would have stopped to speak to you but—but I was in a hurry to get home.”

“Well, you may have heard that I used to be a sort of a one-horse detective,” Braider went on, “and I had acquired a habit of looking for the explanation of nearly every unusual thing I saw, and—well, you coming out of that store before it was opened for trade, while the shutters in the front was still closed, struck me as odd. Then again, remembering your big interest in Pete's case, somehow, it didn't seem to me—meeting you sudden that way—that you looked quite as downhearted as I expected. In fact, I thought you appeared sort o' satisfied over something.”

“Oh!” Garner exclaimed, all at once suspecting Braider of a gigantic ruse to entrap them. “You thought he looked chipper, did you? Well, I must say he looked exactly the other way to me when I first saw him that day.”

“Well, it started me to wondering, anyway,” went on the sheriff, ignoring Garner's interruption, “and I set to work to watch. I hung about the restaurant across the street, smoking a cigar and keeping my eyes on that store. After awhile I saw Bob Smith go in the store and then Wade Tingle. Then I saw a big tray of grub covered with a white cloth sent from the Johnston House, and Bob Smith come to the door and took it in, sending the coon that fetched it back to the hotel. Well, I waited a minute or two and then sauntered, careless-like, across and went in. I chatted awhile with Bob and Wade, noticing, I remember, that for a newspaper man Wade seemed powerful indifferent about gathering items about what had happened, and that Blackburn was busy folding up a tangled lot of short pieces of white sheeting. All this time I was looking about to see where that waiter full of grub had gone. Not a sign of it was in sight, but in a lull in the talk I heard the clink of crockery somewhere below me, and I caught on. Boys, I'm here to tell you that never did a condemned soul feel as I felt. I went out in the open air praying, actually praying, that what I suspected might be true. I started for the jail and on the way met Burt Barrett. I asked him for particulars, and when he said that the Hillbend mob had left word that nobody need even look for the remains of the boy my heart gave a big jump in the same way as it had when that clip and saucer collided in that cellar. I asked Burt if he noticed which way the mob tuck the prisoner, and he said down towards town. I asked him if it wasn't odd for Hillbend folks to go that way to hang a man, and he agreed that it was. Well, to make a long story short, I was on to your gigantic ruse, and God above knows what a load it took off of me. You had saved me, Carson—you had saved me from toting that crime to my grave. I knew you were the ringleader, for I didn't know anybody else who would have thought of such a plan. You are a sight younger man than I am, but you stuck to principle, while I shirked principle, duty, and everything else. Doing all that was hurting your political chances, and you knew it, but you stuck to what was right all the same.”

“Yes, he certainly has queered his political chances,” Garner said, grimly, with a look of wonder in his eye over the sheriff's frank confession. “But you, I think you said, were a Wiggin man,” he finished.

“Well, Wiggin and some others think I am yet,” said Braider; “and I reckon I was till this thing come up; but, boys, I guess I've got a little smidgin of good left in me, for somehow Wiggin has turned my stomach. But I hain't got to what I was leading up to. Neither one of you hain't admitted that there is a nigger in that wood-pile yet, and I don't blame you for keeping it to yourselves. That is your business, but the time has come when Jeff Braider's got to do the right thing or plunge deeper into hellishness, and he's had a taste of what it means and don't want no more of it. I may lose all I've got by it. Wiggin and his gang may beat me to a cold finish next election, but from now on I'm on the other side.”

“Good,” said Garner; “that's the way to talk. Was that what you were leading up to, Braider?”

“Not altogether,” and the sheriff rose and stood over Carson, resting his hand on the young man's shoulder to steady himself. “My boy, I've come to tell you that the damnedest, blackest plot agin you that ever was laid has been hatched out.”

“What is that, Braider?” Carson asked, calmly enough under the circumstances.

“Wiggin and his gang have found out that a trick was played night before last. The Hillbend men convinced them that they didn't lynch anybody, and the Wiggin crowd smelt around until they dropped on to the thing. The only fact they are short on is where the boy is hid. They think he is in the house of one of the negro preachers. Wiggin come to me, not half an hour ago, and considering me one of his stand-bys, he told me all about it. The scheme is for me to arrest Pete and jail 'im on the charge of murder and then to arrest you fer being the ringleader of a jail-breaking gang, who preaches law and order in public for political gain and breaks both in secret.”

“And what do they think will become of Pete?” Carson asked, a touch of supreme bitterness in his tone.

“Wiggin didn't say; but I know what would happen to him. The seeds of bloody riot are being strewn broadcast by the handful. They've been to every member of the crowd that lynched Sam Dudlow and warned them, on their lives, not to repeat the statement that Dudlow had said Pete was innocent. They told the lynchers that you two lawyers were on the hunt for men who had heard the confession and intend to use that as evidence against them.”

“Ah, that is slick, slick!” Garner muttered.

“Slick as double-distilled goose-grease,” said Braider. “The lynchers are denying to friend or foe that Dudlow said a word, and the news is spreading like wildfire that Pete was Dudlow's accomplice, and that you, Carson, are trying, with a gang of town dudes, to carry your point by main, bull-headed force.”

“I see, I see.” Carson had risen and with a deep frown on his face stood leaning against the top of his desk. He extended his hand to the officer and said, “I appreciate your telling me all this, Braider, more than I can say.”

“What's the good of my telling you if the news doesn't benefit you?” the sheriff asked. “Carson, I want to see you win. I ain't half a man myself, but I've got two little boys just starting to grow up, and I wish they could be like you—a two-legged bull-dog that clamps his teeth on what's right and won't let loose. Carson, you've got a chance—a bare chance—to get your man out alive.”

“What's that?” Dwight asked, eagerly.

“Why, let me hold the mob in check by promising to arrest Pete, and you get some trusty feller to take him in a buggy to-night through the country to Chattanooga. It would be a ticklish trip, and you want a man that won't get scared at his shadow, for on every road out of Darley, men will be on the lookout, but if you once got him there he would be absolutely safe, for no mob would go out of the State to do work of that sort. Getting a good man is the main thing.”

“I'll do it myself,” Dwight said, firmly. “You?” Garner cried. “That's absurd!”

“I'm the only one who could do it,” Carson declared, “for Pete would not go with any one else.”

“I really believe you are right,” Garner agreed, reluctantly; “but it is a nasty undertaking after all you've been through.”

“By gum!” exclaimed Braider, extending his hand to Dwight. “I hope you will do it. I want to see you complete a darn good all-round job.” > “Well, you are an officer of the law,” Garner observed, with amusement written all over his rugged face, “asking a man to steal your own prisoner.”

“What else can I do that's at all decent?” Braider asked. “Besides, do you fellows know that there never has been any written warrant for Pete's arrest. I started to jail him without any, and old Mrs. Parsons turned him loose. The only time he was put in jail was by Carson himself. By George! as I look at it, Carson, you have every right to take him out of jail, by any hook or crook, since you was responsible for him being there instead of hanging to a limb of a tree. I tell you, my boy, there ain't any law on earth that can touch you. Nobody is prepared to testify against Pete, and if you will get him to Chattanooga and keep him there for a while he can come back here a free man.”

“I have friends there who will look after him,” Dwight said. “I'll start with him to-night.”