He dropped a fat, ugly revolver which had glinted in the starlight. I pounced on it and flung it into the woods as far as muscle, fright, and anger could prevail. When I turned on the judge he had just tugged another revolver out of his pocket, twin of the other weapon. I had a tussle with him to get it, and he fairly squealed in his fury. But I wrenched the thing out of his clutch and threw it; then I pulled him to his feet and patted him all over, as a policeman frisks a prisoner, to make sure that he was not serving as arsenal for more artillery.
“Judge Kingsley,” I kept saying over and over, “your wife! Your daughter! Think of them!”
I was obliged to drag him out of the woods by main strength. I propelled him along the highway and he walked as stiffly as some kind of a wooden figure, moved by springs. His eyes stared straight ahead and his face was white in the starlight.
So we came into the village without a word between us, and I led him by dark lanes to his house.
Then he held back and replied to what I had said in the woods as if I had just spoken.
“I _am_ thinking of them! That’s why I can’t face them!”
Oh, the tone in which he said that! Questions were crowding in my throat, but I did not dare to pry into troubles as deep as Judge Kingsley’s most certainly were. But I had to have some assurance from him.
“Judge Kingsley,” I said, with respect in my voice, “I am meddling, but God knows there was a call for somebody to meddle just now.”
“I want to be out of my troubles!” He was trembling like a leaf.
“But you’re not so much of a coward, Judge, that you’ll shift off all of your troubles on to your family, along with the awful one you were just about to shove on them! I know you’re not. I have always looked up to you, sir.”.
“But nobody can look up to me from now on, young man!”
“I always shall, sir. We all get rattled some time in our lives.” I knew I was making pretty poor talk to a man like Judge Kingsley, but I was trembling as badly as he was and I did not know what to say to him.
“I’m only poor Ross Sidney, sir. You know I don’t amount to much, but won’t you consider that I have done a little something for you this night? I stopped you when you didn’t know what you were doing.”