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     “Damn Beulah Sewell! She wants to get me out of the way! She wants to bring up my boy like a milk-fed house-cat! That's the reason she lied about what she saw in the bank!”

     “Now, Nate,” Blasingame said quietly, “taking on like that won't help you.”

     “How would you feel about it?” Nathan shouted.

     “Stop it!” Elec Blasingame's big voice blasted on the stone walls of Nathan's cage. “Listen to me, Nate. You're in a bad spot. Your own sister-in-law has identified you as the killer; what do you expect me to do about that?”

     Nathan felt the life going out of him. Hopelessly, he loosened his grip on the bars.

     Finally he said, “This would be almost funny if I didn't know that half the town had lynching on the brain. On the say-so of one woman you lock me up and accuse me of murder and robbery. I didn't have the bank's money on me when they got me, did I? And you can't prove that the bullet that killed Harper came from my gun.”

     “You had plenty time to hide that money,” Blasingame said. “You had time to reload, too.”

     “Is that the kind of evidence you hang a man on in Plainsville?”

     “The strongest evidence in the world. The testimony of a respectable eyewitness to the crime.” This time Elec saw the storm coming, and he added quickly, “But I said I'd listen to you, and I have. I'll go back over the ground and find out what I can about this drifter you claim you saw. Is that fair enough?”

     Before Nathan could answer, he saw Ralph Striker's lanky figure heading toward them. The marshal turned. “I thought you were going home, Ralph.”

     “I was, but I ran into something—the Blaine boy.”

     Nathan grabbed the bars. “Jeff?”

     A new kind of worry crossed Elec Blasingame's face. “Hold the boy in my office, Ralph. Tell him he can see his pa as soon as I'm through talking to him.” The marshal turned back to Nathan. “Nate,” he said solemnly, “a few minutes from now you're going to have to make the most important decision of your whole life. Your boy is probably bewildered and hurt and doesn't know exactly what to think. He's come to you for an answer, and likely he'll believe everything you tell him. What are you going to say, Nate?”

     Nathan stared at the marshal with hard eyes. “My boy will hear the truth!”

     “Do you mean to tell him his aunt is trying to railroad you on a murder charge?”

     “That, and plenty more!”

     Blasingame rubbed his hand over his gleaming scalp. The bulldog look had gone from his face, and he looked like just another tired old man. He said quietly, “Have you thought what it's going to do to the boy, Nate? The Sew-ells are the only people your son has, besides you. If you're convicted here, it'll be up to Beulah and Wirt to see the boy through the worst time of his life. They may not be the kind of people you like, but they're something, and they haven't done such a bad job with Jeff so far. Are you going to poison him with hate, turn him against the only people who might stand by him?”

     Nathan Blaine stood rigid. In his anger he had not imagined that truth could be more deadly than a gun. Blasingame's line of reasoning left a taste of gall in his mouth, made him helpless.

     The marshal said, “I'll check your story as far as I can, Nate. That's all I can do. What you tell your boy—I guess that will have to be left to you and your conscience.” He turned abruptly, a thick, squat figure of a man, and walked back to his office.

     Jeff did not know what to say when he saw his father standing there behind the thick iron bars. All through the violent and sleepless night he had thought of all the things he was going to say. No matter what happened, he had vowed to stick by his pa.

     The vow had been sealed in tears of anger and in fits of rage against his Aunt Beulah. That night he had stopped being a boy and started being a man. He had not spoken to Aunt Beulah this morning; he had not even looked at her, and he would never in his life forgive her for the hateful lies that she had told about his pa.

     But. in spite of all the pledges of loyalty that he had meant to voice, the words were stuck in his throat as he gazed up at those cruel, burning eyes on the other side of the bars. The lines of hate in his pa's face were as deep and hard as chiseled stone. Involuntarily, Jeff took a stumbling step backwards as Nathan grasped the bars in his two hands as though he meant to rip them apart.

     “You're not in school!” Nathan accused him roughly.

     Jeff swallowed. “It ain't time yet. I came here...”

     “... to see what a jailbird looks like? his pa shot at him.

     Jeff felt sickness working within him; his throat was choked and swollen. He said, “I wanted to tell you I don't believe it, any of it! All the things people are sayin'!”

     He was shocked when his pa threw his head back and laughed harshly. The stubble of beard gave Nathan's face a sunken, wolfish look. Sleeplessness had made his eyes bloodshot and mean.

     “So you don't believe it, do you?” Nathan laughed again.

     The chill of that underground cage breathed a stickiness of death in Jeff's face. His heart hammered. It was impossible to believe that iron bars could make such a change in a man. He saw his pa as he had never seen him before—a cruel, ruthless man, quick and mean in every move he made. Jeff felt himself shaking. He could no longer look up into those slitted, bloodshot eyes, but turned his gaze helplessly to the floor.

     Nathan said harshly, “I don't need you to worry about me, boy. Nate Blaine can take care of himself!”

     Now Jeff's whirling thoughts formed words and the words came blurting out. “But it isn't true, is it, what they're saying about the bank! You couldn't shoot an old man like Jed Harper!”

     The look that Nathan threw at him made Jeff cringe. “Couldn't I? Maybe Harper was a fool, maybe he tried something that wasn't very smart. Anyway, what can a kid understand about such things!”

     Abruptly, Nathan threw himself away from the barred door, facing the opposite wall of his cell. “You better get started for the academy,” he said sharply. “I've got important things to think about.”

     Elec Blasingame sat like a block of granite as the boy stumbled blindly through his office and up the cement steps to the street. At last he looked at Ralph Striker, his deputy.

     “I believe in giving the devil his due. I guess I didn't figure Nate Blaine had the guts for a thing like that.”

     Through the office door they could see Nathan stretched stiff as a corpse on his board bunk, facing the wall. It was one of those rare times when Elec Blasingame felt helpless and did not know what to do. At last he got up and said, “Go on home, Ralph. The town is mine for the day.”

     Most of the time the Plainsville marshal was a plodding, methodical man, and that was the way he went about his business today. A nagging seed of doubt had been planted in his mind, and he didn't like it. Elec Blasingame wanted things as clean-cut as possible, either black or white.