passing over the lawyer as if he was not, never had been nor ever was expected to be.
The sheriff didn't know just what his own next move was to be in the case of Laylander. He was trying to get the prosecuting attorney's eye, with a view to a warrant. The judge came down from the bench, Banker Weaver went forward to meet him. The crowd pressed Louise along the aisle to the lawyers' enclosure, space sacred no longer to only licensed feet.
"How is this, Laylander? How did you come to have possession of that note?" the judge asked, now in his capacity of perplexed citizen, a state none the less vexing than that of perplexed judge.
"It was among some papers thrown away by the scoundrels that held us up here the other day, sir."
"I see," said the judge. You've been following that gang of bank robbers, have you? You're the man that's been picking them off along the road. I see."
Tom said nothing. He stood hanging his head as if he had been rebuked, his fair hair rumpled, dust gray in his stubble of beard, confusion over him. Louise stood behind him, a yearning in her to call his name, to give him her hands, to say something endearing that would have been incongruously out of place, and made the crowd laugh.
Judson Weaver told the judge of Tom's arrival at the bank with the money. He spared nothing of the obligation that he, and his institution, stood under to Tom Laylander. It was an obligation, he said, that every man in McPacken shared.
