The Bondboy

When Hammer called his name, Joe felt a revival of his old desire to go to the witness-chair and tell Judge Maxwell all about it in his own way, untenable and dangerous as his p...

Joe was afoot early. His mother came to the place in the fence where the gate once stood to give him a last word of comfort, and to bewail again her selfishness in sending him a...

Constable Bill Frost was not a man of such acute suspicion as Sol Greening. He was a thin, slow man with a high, sharp nose and a sprangling, yellow mustache which extended broa...

The sheriff was a mild-mannered man, whose head was shaped like the end of a watermelon. His hair was close-cut and very thin at the top, due to the fact that all the nourishing...

Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the...

Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee. It aggravated the rheumatis...

It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green...

Although Isom Chase had been in his grave a week, and Judge Little had been cracking his coat-tails over the road between his home and the county-seat daily, the matter of the w...

There was a voice of moaning abroad in the night. It sounded as the rain swept through the rocking trees and bent its spears against Judge Maxwell's study windows; it sighed in...

Progress was swifter the next day. The prosecuting attorney, apparently believing that he had made his case, dismissed many of his remaining witnesses who had nothing to testify...

Mint grew under the peach-trees in Colonel Henry Price's garden, purple-stemmed mint, with dark-green, tender leaves. It was not the equal of the mint, so the colonel contended...

Joe had debated the matter fully in his mind before going in to supper. Since he had sent her tempter away, there was no necessity of taking Ollie to task, thus laying bare his...

Until the time he had entered Isom Chase's house, temptation never had come near Joe Newbolt. He never had kissed a maiden; he never had felt the quickening elixir of a soft bre...

In the light of Joe's reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained myst...

When court convened the following morning for the last act in the prolonged drama of Joe Newbolt's trial, the room was crowded even beyond the congestion of the previous day.

John Owens, the surviving witness to Isom Chase's will, spent his dreary days at the poorhouse whittling long chains of interlocking rings, and fantastic creatures such as the h...

Joe, stunned by the sudden tragedy, stood for a moment as he had stopped when he laid his hand on Isom's shoulder. Ollie, on the other side of the fallen man, leaned over and pe...

Mrs. Newbolt was cutting splints for her new sun-bonnet out of a pasteboard box. She hitched her chair back a little farther into the shadow of the porch, for the impertinent su...

Joe, his face as white as some plant that has sprung in a dungeon, bent his head toward his mother, and placed his free hand on hers where it lay on the arm of her chair.

She appealed to the judge in her manner of saying that; appealed as for the absolution which she had earned by a cruel penance. He nodded kindly, his face very grave.

The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gr...

Ollie's voice, low and steady in earnest determination, broke the current of his denunciation as a knife severs a straining cord. The suddenness of her declaration almost made t...

Judge Little did not confirm this report, but, like the middling-good politician that he was, he entered no denial. As long as the public is uncertain either way, its suspense i...

The will was duly signed and witnessed, and bore a notarial seal. It was dated in the hand of the testator, in addition to the acknowledgment of the notary, all regular, and unq...