The Broken Gate: A Novel

The populace of Spring Valley, largely assembled in the shade of the awnings which served as shelter against an ardent June sun, remained cold to the foregoing challenge. It had...

While the doughty town marshal, endowed now with a courage long foreign to his nature, was leading away his sobbing prisoner, followed by the prisoner's dazed yet angered parent...

The young man stood motionless, facing the white-faced woman who had pronounced his fate for him. Happily it chanced that there came interruption, for a moment relieving both of...

In his narrow little room upstairs in one of the two-story brick buildings which framed the public square of Spring Valley sat J. B. Blackman, Justice of the Peace, upholder of...

By the time Don Lane had reached his mother's house he partially had pulled himself together, but his face was still pale and sullen, not yet recovered from the late encounter.

The commonplace sound of the telephone's ring broke the silence in the little room. Aurora Lane arose and passed into the adjoining room to answer it. Her son regarded her with...

Miss Julia, late mistress of ceremonies, passed here and there, turning out the lights. The bonnets and blouses all had departed, the coughs and shufflings had subsided. She mig...

But old Hod Brooks only put his hands deeper in his pockets and slouched on alongside. "I'll just go on along with you to the gate. It's hot tonight, isn't it? I don't know when...

The sultry night at last was broken by a breathless dawn, the sun rising a red ball over the farm lands beyond the massed maple trees of the town. Not much refreshed by the atte...

"Yes, yes--wait----" She spoke on into the telephone. "Yes, Julia, Don and I were just at breakfast--no, we've not been on the street yet--one o'clock, you said? That was when w...

Don's moody face suddenly lighted up. A young woman was stepping down from one of the cars at the farther end of the train, the porter assisting her to the footstool. Now she wa...

Judge William Henderson was sitting alone in the front room of his cool and spacious office, before him his long table with its clean glass top, so different from the work-bench...

Aurora was pale, quite beyond her wont, haggard-looking about the eyes. She had come direct from her home, without alteration of her usual daily costume. In spite of all, she wa...

When Judge Henderson passed down the office stair, and out across the street toward the narrow little brick walk of the courthouse--which even on that day of the week now held a...

Anne scarcely had left the office when Judge Henderson, stepping into the inner room, pulled open a certain door of a cabinet beneath the washhand-stand. He drew forth a half-fi...

As for Aurora Lane, at about the time Miss Julia was leaving Judge Henderson's office, she herself was in the office of another lawyer upon the opposite side of the square--the...

That Sunday evening Aurora Lane sat alone in her dingy little home. The walls seemed to her close as those of any prison. She found about her nothing of comfort. For once the li...

Neither Judge Henderson nor his ward attended church services this Sunday evening, the former because of a certain physical reaction which disposed him to slumber, the latter be...

Anne Oglesby left the jail shortly after the time when church services were ending. As she hurried by Aurora Lane's house in Mulberry Street she saw a light shining from the win...

At seven o'clock of Monday morning, Johnnie Adamson stood at the roadside at the front of his father's farmhouse. He held in his hands a wagon stake which he had found somewhere...

Now it was nine o'clock of the Monday morning. The grand jury was in session thus early, and it had thus early brought in a true bill against one Dieudonne Lane for murder in th...

It was now ten o'clock of this eventful morning in quiet old Spring Valley. A hush seemed to have fallen on all the town. The streets were well-nigh deserted so far as one might...

Judge Henderson, haggard, shaken, turned and walked down one of the halls which traversed the courthouse building. In the central space, where the two halls crossed at right ang...

Number five roared eastward through the town that day on time. No one stepped down from the train, and no one took passage on it. Spring Valley had dropped back into its customa...

The blessed change in the weather came on apace. The sultry air softened and became more life-giving. Folk moved into the open, sat out upon the steps of the front galleries, ri...