The Bondboy Part 52

Of course, Sol had no knowledge of what was going forward at the county farm that very afternoon, even the very hour when Joe Newbolt was sweating blood on the witness stand, If he had known, it is not likely that he would have waited until morning to spread the tale abroad.

This is what it was.

Ollie's lawyer was there in consultation with Uncle John Owens regarding Isom's will. Consultation is the word, for it had come to that felicitous pa.s.s between them. Uncle John could communicate his thoughts freely to his fellow-beings again, and receive theirs intelligently.

All this had been wrought not by a miracle, but by the systematic preparation of the attorney, who was determined to sound the secret which lay locked in that silent mind. If Isom had a son when that will was made a generation back, Uncle John Owens was the man who knew it, and the only living man.

In pursuit of this mystery, the lawyer had caused to be printed many little strips of cardboard in the language of the blind. These covered all the ground that he desired to explore, from preliminaries to climax, with every pertinent question which his fertile mind could shape, and every answer which he felt was due to Uncle John to satisfy his curiosity and inform him fully of what had transpired.

The attorney had been waiting for Uncle John to become proficient enough in his new reading to proceed without difficulty. He had provided the patriarch with a large slate, which gave him comfortable room for his big characters. Several days before that which the lawyer had set for the exploration of the mystery of Isom Chase's heir, they had reached a perfect footing of understanding.

Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which had come on the attorney's order speedily. It was an immense volume, as big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons, which, not yet determined.

The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had been long and its rising late.

On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned of the death of Isom Chase.

The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.

After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:

"Did you ever witness Isom Chase's will?"

Uncle John took his slate and wrote:

"Yes."

"When?"

"Thirty or forty years ago," wrote Uncle John--what was a decade more or less to him? "When he joined the Order."

Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.

More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of the rites.

"What a st.u.r.dy old goat that must have been!" thought the lawyer.

"Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?" read the pasteboard under the old man's hands.

Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.

"To his son," he wrote. "Isom was the name."

"Do you know when and where that son was born?"

Uncle John's smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual, as if he had a great deal to say.

"He never was born," he wrote, "not up to the time that I lost the world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that I knew him. He was set on a son from his wedding day.

"The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and told him he would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he reminded me. Did Isom get him?"

"No," was the word that Uncle John's fingers found. He shook his head, sadly.

"He worked and saved for him all his life," the old man wrote. "He set his hope of that son above the Lord."

Uncle John was given to understand the importance of his information, and that he might be called upon to give it over again in court.

He was greatly pleased with the prospect of publicly displaying his new accomplishment. The lawyer gave him a printed good-bye, shook him by the hand warmly, and left him poring over his ponderous book, his dumb lips moving as his fingers spelled out the words.

They were near the end and the quieting of all this flurry that had risen over the property of old Isom Chase, said the lawyer to himself as he rode back to town to acquaint his client with her good fortune. There was nothing in the way of her succession to the property now. The probate court would, without question or doubt, throw out that ridiculous doc.u.ment through which old Judge Little hoped to grease his long wallet.

With Isom's will would disappear from the public notice the one testimony of his only tender sentiment, his only human softness; a sentiment and a softness which had been born of a desire and fostered by a dream.

Strange that the hard old man should have held to that dream so stubbornly and so long, striving to gain for it, h.o.a.rding to enrich it, growing bitterer for its long coming, year by year. And at last he had gone out in a flash, leaving this one speaking piece of evidence of feeling and tenderness behind.

Perhaps Isom Chase would have been different, reflected the lawyer, if fate had yielded him his desire and given him a son; perhaps it would have softened his hand and mellowed his heart in his dealings with those whom he touched; perhaps it would have lifted him above the narrow strivings which had atrophied his virtues, and let the sunlight into the dark places of his soul.

So communing with himself, he arrived in town. The people were coming out of the court-house, the lowering gray clouds were settling mistily.

But it was a clearing day for his client; he hastened on to tell her of the turn fortune had made in her behalf.

CHAPTER XX

"THE PENALTY IS DEATH!"

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.

People felt that Sam Lucas was not through with the accused lad yet; they wanted to be present for the final and complete crucifixion. It was generally believed that, under the strain of Lucas's bombardment, Joe would break down that day.

The interference of Alice Price, unwarranted and beyond reason, the public said, had given the accused a respite, but nothing more. Whatever mistaken notion she had in doing it was beyond them, for it was inconceivable that she could be wiser than another, and discover virtues in the accused that older and wiser heads had overlooked. Well, after the rebuke that Judge Maxwell had given her, _she_ wouldn't meddle again soon. It was more than anybody expected to see her in court again. No, indeed, they said; that would just about settle _her_.

Such a fine girl, too, and such a blow to her father. It was a piece of forwardness that went beyond the imagination of anybody in the town.

Could it be that Alice Price had become tainted with socialism or woman's rights, or any of those wild theories which roared around the wide world outside Shelbyville and created such commotion and unrest?

Maybe some of those German doctrines had got into her head, such as that young Professor Gobel, whom the regents discharged from the college faculty last winter, used to teach.

It was too bad; nearly everybody regretted it, for it took a girl a long time to live down a thing like that in Shelbyville. But the greatest shock and disappointment of all was, although n.o.body would admit it, that she had shut Joe's mouth on the very thing that the public ear was itching to hear. She had cheated the public of its due, and taken the food out of its mouth when it was ravenous. That was past forgiveness.

Dark conjectures were hatched, therefore, and scandalous hints were set traveling. Mothers said, well, they thanked their stars that she hadn't married _their_ sons; and fathers philosophized that you never could tell how a filly would turn out till you put the saddle on her and tried her on the road. And the public sighed and gasped and shook its head, and was comfortably shocked and satisfyingly scandalized.

The sheriff brought the prisoner into court that morning with free hands. Joe's face seemed almost beatific in its exalted serenity as he saluted his waiting mother with a smile. To those who had seen the gray pallor of his strained face yesterday, it appeared as if he had cast his skin during the night, and with it his hara.s.sments and haunting fears, and had come out this morning as fresh and unscarred as a child.

Joe stood for a moment running his eyes swiftly over the room. When they found the face they sought a warm light shot into them as if he had turned up the wick of his soul. She was not so near the front as on the day before, yet she was close enough for eye to speak to eye.

People marked the exchange of unspoken salutations between them, and nudged each other, and whispered: "There she is!" They wondered how she was going to cut up today, and whether it would not end for her by getting herself sent to jail, along with that scatter-feathered young crow whom she seemed to have taken into her heart.

Ollie was present, although Joe had not expected to see her, he knew not why. She was sitting in the first row of benches, so near him he could have reached over and taken her hand. He bowed to her; she gave him a sickly smile, which looked on her pale face like a dim breaking of sun through wintry clouds.