Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/372

 do it. He quailed before the smoldering judgment in those remorseless black beads of eyes and turned away glad enough to be facing them no longer. He tried to retire with dignity and perhaps managed it, but as he walked down the M.P.'s cleared space it was like running a gauntlet. He smarted under the curious and, as he felt, exulting glances bent on him. When he reached the car, his forehead, under the hatband, was wet with a sweat of physical and spiritual weakness. John Boland was almost in.

But at the very door of his car, he halted and turned and looked back over the heads of people, over the tops of tepces to the county jail. There his eyes roved until they found one window high up from which the bars were conspicuously missing. On this window he fixed his gaze for a few seconds and the expression of the lined face changed—changed as if hope sprang up again in him, for Old Two Blades was a very tenacious man.

There was hope even in Skookum Charlie, if he had known that the gleam in the old eyes was one half of humor—if he had known that Skookum Charlie, besides being a fierce and vengeful chief of a wronged and defrauded people, was also a mild and gentle elder of a Christian church. Yet, for that matter, neither did Skookum Charlie know that Boland, besides being a mighty creator of civilization, as well as a criminal optimist, was also an elder of a church.