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As she sought to reassure herself, she remembered that in a cross-hall she had noted the telephone, the wire still intact, as she knew, for the connection of the hotel was with that of the bungalow on a party-line of the exchange at Shaftesville, twenty miles away. If she should be really frightened, she could in one moment call up the house across the ravine.
They felt a revivifying impetus in the thought that after their death Valeria would have a good husband to care for her, for to them the chief grief of their loosening hold on life was her inheritance of their helplessness and poverty. The courthouse in Shaftesville seemed a very imposing edifice to people unaccustomed to the giddy heights of a second story.
Lillian, however, was perfectly calm as she called up "Long Distance" and gave the address of Julian Bayne in the city of Glaston the number of his office and his residence as well. The two women in the firelight glanced at each other in mute significance. Then Lillian urged the operator at Shaftesville to the utmost diligence. "Find him wherever he is. Send special messenger.
He declared he had intended to ask her to marry him anyhow, for she had always seemed to like him she could not deny this but now was the auspicious time to-morrow while the circus was in Shaftesville, and "good money" was to be had to provide for the wants of her old grandparents.
Moreover, Julian Bayne had already proved himself man enough to be safely chargeable with his own affairs. "At Crystal?... Thirty miles from Shaftesville?... Telephone exchange there?... So much obliged! Good-by!" The bitter disappointment! The torturing delay!
In spite of all denial, the telephone bell was presently jangling as Briscoe rang up the passenger-agent at the railroad depot in the little town of Shaftesville, twenty miles away. "Twenty-six yes, Central, I did say twenty-six!... Hello, Tucker, is that you?... See here Mr.
An' that candidate, the gay one, he say he reckon the feller kem from that circus what is goin' fer show in Shaftesville termorrer mebbe he hearn 'bout the bran dance an' wanted ter hev some fun out'n the country folks. That candidate say he hed hearn dozens o' ventriloquisks in shows in the big towns though this war about the bes' one he could remember.
In the light of after events, one might wonder if the genial, care-free Edward Briscoe remembered any detail of the discarded arrangement of the previous evening for the transportation of his transitory guest, Frank Dean, to Shaftesville; if he realized that at the moment when the revenue officer would have been starting on the journey, as the host had insistently planned it, he was himself at the turn of the road and just beyond the jutting crag; if he divined that the vibrations of the telephone wire had betrayed the matter to a crafty listening ear on the party-line in the vacant hotel across the ravine or was the time too short for the consideration?
None of his capacity to make himself understood had the boy lost by the craft of the moonshiners in placing him where he would never hear an English word and was likely to forget the language. A very coherent story he told still later when he was brought into the criminal court at Shaftesville, being the capital of the county in Tennessee where the deed was perpetrated, and confronted by Copenny.
You can hunt all day with Bayne and me, and a little before sunset you can start for Shaftesville, and she will whisk you there in an hour and a quarter, twenty miles. You needn't start till five o'clock to catch the seven-ten train, with lots of time to spare."
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