Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1908-10-02
SERVING
HIS TIME
BYSARAH BRIDGES STEBBLNS.
BY SARAH BRIDGES STEBBLNS.

gone under the influence of liquor to
remember much more than the scene,
which sobered them.
| When the prisoner was brought to
the bar, he looked ten years older than
on that fatal night; his changed ap-
pearance excited the commiseration Of
those who had known him before, but
to the majority Of spectators he was
simply a representative bloodthirster
that, with undisciplined temper and
ever ready weapon, brought disturb
ance and dread into the peaceful COM
munity.
| One friend he had who did not fail
him-the professor before spoken Of
DIR. Girtney-who, in his peculiar esti-
| mate of men, had taken a curious lik-
| ing to his southern student, discov-
ering in him promises and characteris-
tics which Fletcher himself did not then
know he possessed. So when the COM
panions of a day returned to their
homes and left him to his fate, when
the press and outside world branded
him with prejudiced malignity, when
his own soul was torn with the tumults
of remorse and despair, this faithful
friend kept at his side, and did all that
one man could do, even to arousing
against himself unpopularity, and an
outcry, that he encouraged and upheld
those whom it was his interest to con-
ciliate.
Still Dr. Girtney stood well in the
esteem of his fellow citizens as one
high upon the roll of his professions; his
word had some influential weight and
he used part of Fletcher's patrimony
judiciously in his defense; but the ma
jesty of the law was to be vindicated
and the judge pronounced the severe
sentence of twenty years Imprisonment
with hard labor
1t was all over at last; Fletcher had
been borne away to his weary DOOM
the excitement had subsided, and in a
little while he and the incidents con-
nected with him would have faded
from the public mind; but alone in his
chamber that night DR.. Girtney could
not sleep, walking the floor excitedly
and ever and anon his perturbed
thoughts broke out in agitated speech.
my Cod" he said, twenty years
twenty years of living burial for a
mind like that! The man is a born
healer-he has got the unerring eye the
I.skillful hand the inductive brain that
never can be merely made by practice
or study. He is a genius and does not
know it himself. I have watched him
and weighed him. There Is not his like
in all the rising men Of the profession
He only wanted time and opportu-
nifty to develop greatness. Good heav-
ems! to think a moment Of folly, an
| impulse of rage should undo and pre-
vent all this 1t is loss to the world,
and he and 1t are equally blind to the
fact. It is not only a man that is put
away and done for; it is a whole gen.
Grafton of suffering and disease that
may cry in vain for such a helper as 1t
is in him to be. 1t is the progress Of
science that is held back by the fet-
tering Of such a one that twenty years
would have made ADLER than any Of
us. There is something in him, too,
greater than art-I have seen 1t these
last days-that, when all the rubbish of
hot blood and youthful passions had
noble. There's patience and modesty,
unselfshness and sensitive honor, truth
and justice, such as go to the making
of no common man! What a career
cut ofs-what a power quenched! 1t
cannot be; it shall not be! The earth
is too barren of such beings to afford
] to lose what l see him to be. He shall
have his chance in spite Of judge and
jury-Tn find way if die for it! He
shall be free!"
1t will be seen by his soliloquy that
it is rather a difficult thing to deter
mine whether DR.. Girtney was most in
| fluenced by enthusiasm in his profess
sion or personal interest in Fletcher.
| The motives of man are very complex,
so that they themselves cannot always
separate them; and there were those
who had said Of Girtney that he was
more of a physician than a philan-
thropist, and that his profession ranked
often in his mind before persons.
The next day the professor presented
! himself at the prison for a last inter-
view with the lonely captive he had
befriended, and who was henceforth
condemned to the company of convicts.
Nothing and no one that he met on his
way from the entrance to the cell es-
| capped his keen observation, from the
stony eyed warden, with a face hard
as the wall, where never a shade Of
comparison or tenderness stirred the
fixed and infiexible expression of cruel
ty and brute force, to the turnkey who
carried the keys and used them as
i though he had kind Of sullen spite
against them to be vented in rough
handling; from the massive gates to
the impregnable locks that seemed to
shut out hope from all upon whom they
closed.
1t struck DR.. Girtney strangely that,
after some preliminary conversation
entirely unconnected with matters
both naturally had in their minds, and
} in consequence of an almost casual
remark, that Fletcher should say to
him:
My friend, the punishment Of crime
) is meted out by God and man. I be-
lieve, from what have seen here, that
some receive only that which is rem
dered to them by their fellow Great
ures; but for those who have lived
higher up. for those whose hearts,
=, whose cOnScienceS whose intellects
have been cultivated for them the real
punishment is of God-the true eX-
piation must be made to Him. Do you
think that all those years of incarcera-
tion which stretch before me can cause
me to suffer by their length and in
, Fiction what have already endured in
this den? What are the hardships. the
, ignomny, the dreariness Of such a life