Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/372

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360
RESURRECTION ROCK

that you, through your man Kincheloe, did not kill him a few weeks ago at Resurrection Rock! Say it is not so!"

She stopped and waited for answer; but Lucas Cullen neither stirred nor replied. She had swung the eyes of every one from herself to him; and his eyes, only, moved—his small, keen, crafty eyes darted from left to right and back again, resting nowhere, meeting no one, ceaselessly seeking for void in which to look; and finding all space filled with the eyes of the living or—who knew?—with eyes of the dead.

The room had become a court with Lucas Cullen the prisoner accused and on trial; and as though his son's wife and his grandson realized that, without response, he could not go free, they ceased to pull at him; moreover, Barney Loutrelle sat very close to him. Barney did nothing; but Jaccard gazed at Barney, and Jaccard also refrained from interfering.

And the others now realized that they composed the court before which Mrs. Oliver Cullen was haling Lucas Cullen for murder,—for one murder done long ago but also for another done recently and for which, as they gazed at Lucas Cullen, they saw he could not deny guilt. So the original sensations which had swept over them first when they seemed to hear Agnes Cullen's spirit speak and then when they knew that Agnes Cullen herself had returned as though from the dead, were lost in this new amazement.

"My father did not die for many years," Barney heard his mother say. "My mother worked to support herself and me and for money which constantly she paid to lawyers for pleas to get my father free. She tried too hard; she died when I was a young girl, and I took up the useless attempts. The way to accom-