The Bondboy Part 41

Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now, scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn half-way to the top.

The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels of reluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be p.r.o.nounced upon them, had kicked it in protest as they pa.s.sed. It was as solemn and gloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had gone up it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treads were worn to splinters; its bal.u.s.trade was hacked by the knives of generations of loiterers. There was no window in the wall giving upon it; darkness hung over its first landing on the brightest day. The just and the unjust alike were shrouded in its gloomy penumbra as they pa.s.sed. It was the solemn warder at the gate, which seemed to cast a taint over all who came, and fasten a cloud upon them which they must stand in the white light of justice to purge away.

When the civil war began, the flag of the Union was taken down from the cupola of the court-house. In all the years that had pa.s.sed since its close, the flag never had been hoisted to its place of honor again. That event was not to take place, indeed, until twenty years or more after the death of Isom Chase, when the third court-house was built, and the old generation had pa.s.sed away mainly, and those who remained of it had forgotten. But that incident is an incursion into matters which do not concern this tale.

Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcely astir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons of farmers and the straggling troops of hors.e.m.e.n from far-lying districts began to come in and seek hitching-room around the court-house square.

It looked very early in the day as if there was going to be an unusual crowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.

Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spread wider than the sound of the best deeds of the worthiest man in the county. It was not so much on account of the notoriety of the old man, which had not died with him, as the mystery in the manner of his death, that people were anxious to attend the trial.

It was not known whether Joe Newbolt was to take the witness-stand in his own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; under the law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of his testimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor's hand. Joe would be confronted with that, and, if there was a spark of s.p.u.n.k in him, people said, he would rise up and stand by it. And then, once Sam Lucas got him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions and concealments.

Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state had summoned forty witnesses; Hammer's list was half as long. It was a question in the public speculation what either side expected to prove or disprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to prove very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw of his client's well-known honesty and clean past.

Fully an hour before Judge Maxwell arrived to open court, the benches down toward the front were full. This vantage ground had been preempted mainly by the old men whose hearing was growing dim. They sat there with their old hands, as brown as blackberry roots, clasped over their sticks and umbrellas, their peaked old chins up, their eyes alert. Here and there among them sat an ancient dame, shawled and kerchiefed, for the day was chill; and from them all there rose the scent of dry tobacco-leaves, and out of their midst there sounded the rustling of paper-bags and the cracking of peanut-sh.e.l.ls.

"Gosh m' granny!" said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stood a moment after placing a pitcher of water and a gla.s.s on the bench, ready for Judge Maxwell's hand. "They're here from Necessity to Tribulation!"

Of course the captain was stretching the territory represented by that gathering somewhat, for those two historic post offices lay farther away from Shelbyville than the average inhabitant of that country ever journeyed in his life. But there was no denying that they had come from surprising distances.

There was Uncle Posen Spratt, from Little Sugar Creek, with his steer's-horn ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife, July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a road that pitched from end to end when it didn't slant from side to side, and took a s.h.a.g-barked, sharp-s.h.i.+nned, cross-eyed wind-splitter to travel.

There sat old Bev Munday, from Blue Cut, who hadn't been that far away from home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on his head; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he'd keep it there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, from Sni-a-bar Towns.h.i.+p was over there in the corner where he could slant up and spit out of the window, and there was California Colboth, as big around the waist as a cow, right behind him. She had came over in her dish-wheeled buggy from Green Valley, and she was staying with her married son, who worked on the railroad and lived in that little pink-and-blue house behind the water-tank.

Oh, you could stand there--said Captain Taylor--and name all the old settlers for twenty-seven mile in a ring! But the captain hadn't the time, even if he was taken with the inclination, for the townspeople began to come, and it was his duty to stand at the door and shut off the stream when all the benches were full.

That was Judge Maxwell's order; n.o.body was to be allowed to stand around the walls or in the aisles and jig and shuffle and kick up a disturbance just when the lawyers or witnesses might be saying something that the captain would be very anxious to hear. The captain indorsed the judge's mandate, and sustained his judgment with internal warmth.

General Bryant and Colonel Moss Punton came early, and sat opposite each other in the middle of the aisle, each on the end of a bench, where they could look across and exchange opinions, yet escape being crowded by the mongrel stock which was sure to come pouring in soon. A good many unnoted sons of distinguished fathers arrived in pairs and troops, with perfumery on their neckties and chewing-gum in their teeth; and their sisters, for the greater part as lovely as they were knotty, warty, pimply, and weak-shanked, came after them in churchlike decorum and settled down on the benches like so many light-winged birds. But not without a great many questioning glances and shy explorations around them, not certain that this thing was proper and admissible, it being such a mixed and dry-tobacco atmosphere. Seeing mothers here, grandfathers there, uncles and aunts, cousins and neighbors everywhere, they settled down, a.s.sured, to enjoy the day.

It was a delightfully horrid thing to be tried for murder, they said, even though one was obscure and n.o.body, a bound servant in the fields of the man whom he had slain. Especially if one came off clear.

Then Hammer arrived with three law-books under his arm. He was all sleek and s.h.i.+ning, perfumed to the last possible drop. His alpaca coat had been replaced by a longer one of broadcloth, his black necktie surely was as dignified and somberly learned of droop as Judge Burns', or Judge Little's, or Attorney Pickell's, who got Perry Norris off for stealing old man Purvis' cow.

Mrs. Newbolt was there already, awaiting him at the railing which divided the lawyers from the lawed, lawing, and, in some cases, outlawed. She was so un.o.btrusive in her rusty black dress, which looked as if it were made of storm-streaked umbrellas, that n.o.body had noticed her.

Now, when they saw her stand and shake hands with Hammer, and saw Hammer obsequiously but conspicuously conduct her to a chair within the sacred precincts of the bar, there were whisperings and straightenings of backs, and a stirring of feet with that concrete action which belongs peculiarly to a waiting, expectant crowd, but is impossible to segregate or individually define.

Judge Maxwell opened the door of his chamber, which had stood tall and dark and solemnly closed all morning just a little way behind the bench, and took his place. At the same moment the sheriff, doubtless timing himself to the smooth-working order, came in from the witness-room, opening from the court-room at the judge's right hand, with the prisoner.

Joe hesitated a little as the sheriff closed the door behind them, his hand on the prisoner's shoulder, as if uncertain of what was next required of him. The sheriff pushed him forward with commanding gesture toward the table at which Hammer stood, and Joe proceeded to cross the room in the fire of a thousand eyes.

It seemed to him that the sheriff might have made the entrance less spectacular, that he could have brought him sooner, or another way. That was like leading him across a stage, with the audience all in place, waiting the event. But Joe strode along ahead of the sheriff with his head up, his long, s.h.a.ggy hair smoothed into some semblance of order, his spare garments short and outgrown upon his bony frame. His arms were ignominiously bound in the sheriff's handcuffs, linked together by half a foot of dangling chain.

That stirring sigh of mingled whispers and deep-drawn breaths ran over the room again; here and there someone half rose for a better look. The dim-eyed old men leaned forward to see what was coming next; Uncle Posen Spratt put up his steer's-horn trumpet as if to blow the blast of judgment out of his ear.

Joe sat in the chair which Hammer indicated; the sheriff released one hand from the manacles and locked the other to the arm of the chair.

Then Captain Taylor closed the door, himself on the outside of it, and walked down to the front steps of the court-house with slow and stately tread. There he lifted his right hand, as if to command the attention of the world, and p.r.o.nounced in loud voice this formula:

"Oy's, oy's, oy's! The hon'r'bl' circuit court of the _hum_teenth judicial de-strict is now in session, pursu'nt t' 'j'urnm'nt!"

Captain Taylor turned about as the last word went echoing against the First National Bank, and walked slowly up the stairs. He opened the court-room door and closed it; he placed his back against it, and folded his arms upon his breast, his eyes fixed upon a stain on the wall.

Judge Maxwell took up some papers from the desk, and spread one of them before him.

"In the matter of Case No. 79, State _vs._ Newbolt. Gentlemen, are you ready for trial?"

The judge spoke in low and confidential voice, meant for the attorneys at the bar only. It scarcely carried to the back of the room, filled with the sound-killing vapors from five hundred mouths, and many of the old men in the front seats failed to catch it, even though they cupped their hands behind their ears.

Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose.

Slight and pale, with a thin chest and a stoop forward, he was distinguished by the sharp eyes beside his flat-bridged nose, so flattened out, it seemed, by some old blow, that they could almost communicate with each other across it. His light, loose hair was very long; when he warmed up in speaking he shook it until it tumbled about his eyes. Then it was his habit to sweep it back with the palm of his hand in a long, swinging movement of the arm. It was a most expressive gesture; it seemed as if by it he rowed himself back into the placid waters of reasoning. Now, as he stood before Judge Maxwell, he swept his palm over his forelock, although it lay snug and unruffled in its place.

"Your honor, the state is ready," said he, and remained standing.

Hammer pushed his books along the table, shuffled his papers, and rose ponderously. He thrust his right hand into the bosom of his coat and leaned slightly against the left in an att.i.tude of scholarly preparedness.

"Your honor, the defense is ready," he announced.

CHAPTER XVI

"SHE COMETH NOT," HE SAID

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.

"It will soon be over with now, Mother," he encouraged, with the hope in his heart that it would, indeed, be so.

With an underling in his place at the door, Captain Taylor advanced to take charge of the marshaling of the jury panel. There ensued a great bustling and tramping as the clerk called off the names of those drawn.

While this was proceeding, Joe cast his eyes about the room, animated by a double hope: that Alice would be there to hear him tell his story; that Morgan had come and was in waiting to supply the facts which honor sealed upon his own tongue. He could see only the first few rows of benches with the certainty of individual identification; they were filled with strangers. Beyond them it was conglomerate, that fused and merged thing which seemed a thousand faces, yet one; that blended and commingled ma.s.s which we call the public. Out of the ma.s.s Joe Newbolt could not sift the lean, shrewd face of Curtis Morgan, nor glean from it the brown hair of Alice Price.

The discovery that Alice was not there smote him with a feeling of sudden hopelessness and abandonment; the reproaches which he had kindled against himself in his solitary days in jail rose up in redoubled torture. He blamed the rashness of an unreasoning moment in which he had forgotten time and circ.u.mstance. Her interest was gone from him now, where, if he had waited for vindication, he might have won her heart.

But it was a dream, at the best, he confessed, turning away from his hungry search of the crowd, his head drooping forward in dejection. What did it matter for the world's final exculpation, if Alice were not there to hear?

His mother nodded to somebody, and touched his hand. Ollie it was, whom she greeted. She was seated near at hand, beside a fat woman with a red and greasy face, whose air of protection and large interest proclaimed her a relative. Joe thought that she filled pretty well the bill that Ollie had made out of her mother, on that day when she had scorned her for having urged her into marriage with Isom.

Ollie was very white in her black mourning dress, and thinner of features than when he had seen her last. She smiled, and nodded to him, with an air of timid questioning, as if doubtful whether he had expected it, and uncertain how it would be received. Joe bowed his head, respectfully.

What a wayside flower she seemed, thought he; how common beside Alice!

Yet, she had been bright and refres.h.i.+ng in the dusty way where he had found her. He wondered why she was not within the rail also, near Hammer, if she was for him; or near the prosecutor, if she was on the other side.

He was not alone in this speculation. Many others wondered over that point also. It was the public expectation that she naturally would a.s.sist the state in the punishment of her husband's slayer; but Sam Lucas was not paying the slightest attention to her, and it was not known whether he even had summoned her as a witness.

And now Captain Taylor began to create a fresh commotion by clearing the spectators from the first row of benches to make seats for the jury panel. Judge Maxwell was waiting the restoration of order, leaning back in his chair. Joe scanned his face.