The Wild Olive | Page 6

must have foreseen something of this sort
when you took up the law."
The answer reached Ford's ears only as a murmur, but he guessed its
import from the response.
"True," she returned, when he had spoken, "to foresee possibilities is
one thing, and to meet them is another; but the anticipation does
something to nerve one for the necessity when it comes."
Again there was a murmur in which Ford could distinguish nothing, but
again her reply told him what it meant.
"The right and the wrong, as I understand it," she went on, "is
something with which you have nothing to do. Your part is to
administer the law, not to judge of how it works."
Once more Ford was unable to catch what was said in reply, but once
more the lady's speech enlightened him.
"That's the worst of it? Possibly; but it's also the best of it; for since it
relieves you of responsibility it's foolish for you to feel remorse."
What was the motive of these remarks? Ford found himself possessed
of a strange curiosity to know. He pressed as closely as he dared to the
open door, but for the moment nothing more was said. In the silence
that followed he began again to wonder how he could best make his
demand for food, when a sound from behind startled him. It was the
sound which, among all others, caused him the wildest alarm--that of a
human footstep. His next movement came from the same blind impulse
that sends a hunted fox to take refuge in a church--eager only for the
instant's safety. He had sprung to his feet, cleared the threshold, and
leaped into the room, before the reflection came to him that, if he was
caught, he must at least be caught game. Wheeling round toward the

window-door through which he had entered, he stood defiantly,
awaiting his pursuers, and heedless of the astonished eyes fixed upon
him. It was not till some seconds had gone by, and he realized that he
was not followed, that he glanced about the room. When he did so it
was to ignore the woman, in order to concentrate all his gaze on the
little, iron-gray man who, still seated, stared at him, with lips parted. In
his own turn, Norrie Ford was dumb and wide-eyed in amazement It
was a long minute before either spoke.
"You?"
"You?"
The monosyllable came simultaneously from each. The little woman
got to her feet in alarm. There was inquiry as well as terror in her
face--inquiry to which her husband felt prompted to respond.
"This is the man," he said, in a voice of forced calmness,
"whom--whom--we've been talking about."
"Not the man--you--?"
"Yes," he nodded, "the man I--I--sentenced to death--this morning."

II

"Evie!"
Mrs. Wayne went to the door, but on Ford's assurance that her child
had nothing to fear from him, she paused with her hand on the knob to
look in curiosity at this wild young man, whose doom lent him a kind
of fascination. Again, for a minute, all three were silent in the excess of
their surprise. Wayne himself sat rigid, gazing up at the new-comer
with strained eyes blurred with partial blindness. Though slightly built
and delicate, he was not physically timid; and as the seconds went by

he was able to form an idea as to what had happened. He himself, in
view of the tumultuous sympathy displayed by hunters and
lumber-jacks with the man who passed for their boon companion, had
advised Ford's removal from the pretty toy prison of the county-town to
the stronger one at Plattsville. It was clear that the prisoner had been
helped to escape, either before the change had been effected or while it
was taking place. There was nothing surprising in that; the astonishing
thing was that the fugitive should have found his way to this house
above all others. Mrs. Wayne seemed to think so too, for it was she
who spoke first, in a tone which she tried to make peremptory, in spite
of its tremor of fear.
"What did you come here for?"
Ford looked at her for the first time--in a blankness not without a dull
element of pleasure. It was at least two or three years since he had seen
anything so dainty--not, in fact, since his own mother died. At all times
his mind worked slowly, so that he found nothing to reply till she
repeated her question with a show of increased severity.
"I came here for protection," he said then.
His hesitation and bewildered air imparted assurance to his still
astonished hosts.
"Isn't it an odd place in which to look for that?" Wayne asked, in an
excitement, he strove to subdue.
The question was the stimulus