On account of the order, the colonel had no time for Joe, for art with him, especially corn art, was above the worries and concerns of all men. He did not forget the prisoner in the white heat of his commission. For several days he had it in his mind to ask Alice to visit him, and carry to him the assurance of the continuance of the family interest and regard. But it was an unconventional thing to request of a young lady; a week slipped past before the colonel realized it while he temporized in his mind.

At last he approached it circuitously and with a great deal of diplomatic concealment of his purpose, leaving ample room for retreat without unmasking his intention, in case he should discern indications of unwillingness.

By that time the election was over and the country regularly insured against anarchy, devastation, and ruin for two years longer. The prosecuting attorney and the sheriff had been reelected; the machinery of the law was ready to turn at the grist.

The colonel was pleased to see that Alice seconded him in his admission that they had been treating Joe Newbolt shamefully. Of course the sheriff was partly to blame for that, having set himself up with metropolitan importance, now that he was secure in office. He had put aside Wednesday as the one day of the week on which visitors, other than relatives or counsel of prisoners, would be permitted to enter the jail.

It chanced to be a Wednesday morning when the colonel got around to it finally, and they agreed heartily and warmly that somebody ought to go and carry a little gleam of cheer and encouragement to Joe. The colonel looked at his unfinished picture, then at the mellow light of the autumn day, so much like the soul of corn itself, and then at Alice. He lifted his eyebrows and waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"Never mind," said she; "you go ahead with the picture; I'll go alone."

The colonel blessed her, and turned to his picture with a great sigh of relief. Alice left him to prepare for her visit, a flutter of eagerness in her heart, a feeling of timid nervousness which was unaccountable and strange.

She was not accustomed to trembling at the thought of meeting young men. Usually she went forward to the ordeal with a smile, which the victim would not have gathered a great deal of pleasure from, in most cases, if he had been able to read, for he would have seen her appraisement of him on her lips. There was none of this amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the mystery of its source.

She had been surprised by the depth of this unpromising subject, to whom she had turned at first out of pity for his mother. The latent beauties of his rugged mind, full of the stately poetry of the old Hebrew chronicles, had begun to unfold to her sympathetic perception in the three visits she had made in her father's company. Each visit had brought some new wonder from that crude storehouse of his mind, where Joe had been hoarding quaint treasures all his lonely, companionless years.

And Joe, even in his confinement, felt that he was free in a larger sense than he ever had been before. He was shaking out his wings and beginning to live understandingly and understood. It was beyond him to believe it sometimes; beyond him always to grasp the reality of Alice Price, and her friendship for one so near the dust as he.

What was there about the poor folks' boy, bound out but yesterday to Isom Chase, and still bound to his estate under the terms of his articles? What was there in him to reach out and touch the sympathies of this beautiful young woman, who came to him with the scent of violets in her hair? Others had despised him for his poverty, and fastened a name upon him which was in itself a reproach. And still misunderstanding, they had carried him off to prison, charged with a dark and hideous crime. Now this light had come to him in his despair, like the beam of that white star above the Judean plains. Like that star, she would stand far off to guide him, and exalt his soul by its strivings to attain her level. There their relations must cease. He might yearn his heart away in the gulf that lay between them, and stretch out his empty hands for evermore, never to feel its nearer warmth upon his breast. He was the poor folks' boy.

There was a wan sun on the day she came alone to the jail, a day so long remembered by Joe and held by him so dear. A solemn wind was roaming the tree-tops outside his cell window; the branches stood bleak and bare against the mottled sky.

Alice wore a dress of some soft gray material, which seemed to embrace her in warm comfort, and reveal her in a new and sprightly loveliness. Her rippled hair was free upon her temples, her ear peeped out from beneath it with a roguish tint upon it, as if it waited to be kissed, and blushed for its own temerity. A gay little highland bonnet rode the brown billows of her abundant hair, saucy and bold as a corsair, with one bright little feather at its prow. Perhaps it was no more than a goose quill, or a cock's plume dipped in dye, but to Joe it seemed as glorious as if it had been plucked from the fairest wing in the gardens of paradise.

The marvel of it came over Joe again as he stood close against the bars to greet her. She, so rare and fine, so genteel and fair, caring enough for him and his unpromising fate to put aside the joyous business of her unhampered life and seek him in that melancholy place. It seemed a dream, yet she was there, her delicate dark brows lifted questioningly, as if uncertain that he would approve her unconventional adventure, a smile in the depths of her serene, frank eyes. Her cheeks were glowing from the sparks of morning, and her ungloved hand was reaching out to meet him.

He clasped it, and welcomed her with joy that he could not have simulated any more than he could have hidden. There was a tremor in his voice; a hot sweep of blood flamed in his face like a confession of his secret soul.

"I never saw you look so tall," said he slowly, measuring her with adoring eyes.

"Maybe it's the dress," said she, looking herself over with a little expressive sweep of the hands, as if to put all the blame on that innocent nun-gray gown, if there was blame to be borne.

She wore a little bunch of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold spikes against their lovely bed.

"I don't know that it's the dress," said he, "but you do look taller than usual, it seems to me."

She laughed, as if she found humor in his solemn repetition of such a trivial discovery.

"Well, I can't help being tall," she said. "How tall would you have a lady grow? How tall do you think one ought to be?"

"'As high as my heart,'" said Joe, remembering Orlando's words.

The color deepened in her cheeks; she caught her breath with a little "Oh!"

She wondered what sprout of blue-blooded and true-blooded nobility in Shelbyville there was capable of turning a reply like that without straining for it more than that pale cavalier with his worn clothing hanging loose upon his bony frame. When she ventured to lift her eyes to his face, she found him grasping a bar of the cell door with one hand, as if he would tear it from its frame. His gaze was fixed upon the high window, he did not turn. She felt that he was struggling with himself that moment, but whether to drive to speech or to withhold it, she could not tell.

"I wish I could go out there and run about five miles this morning," he sighed.

She gave him sigh for sigh, feeling that something was lost. He had not striven with himself merely to say that. But from there they went on to talk of his coming trial, and to expose the mutual hope that no further excuse would be advanced for its continuance. He seemed to be certain that the trial would see an end of his difficulty, and she trembled to contemplate any other outcome.

So they stood and talked, and her face was glowing and her eyes were bright.

"Your cheeks are as red as bitter-sweet," said he.

"There was frost last night," she laughed, "and the cool wind makes my face burn."

"I know just how it feels," said he, looking again toward the window with pathetic wistfulness, the hunger of old longings in his eyes.

"It will not be long now until you are free," she said in low voice of sympathy.

He was still looking at the brown branches of the bare elm, now palely touched with the cloud-filtered autumn sun.

"I know where there's lots of it," said he, as if to himself, "out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there's plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the room with it."

He turned to her with apologetic appeal, as if to excuse himself for having wandered away from her in his thoughts.

"I put it over the mantel," she nodded; "it lasts all winter."

"The wahoo's red now, too," said he. "Do you care for it?"

"It doesn't last as long as bitter-sweet," said she.

"Bitter-sweet," said he reflectively, looking down into the shadows which hung to the flagstones of the floor. Then he raised his eyes to hers and surprised them brimming with tears, for her heart was aching for him in a reflection of his own lonely pain.

"It is emblematic of life," said he, reaching his hand out through the bars to her, as if to beg her not to grieve over the clouds of a day; "you know there are lots of comparisons and verses and sayings about it in that relation. It seems to me that I've always had more of the bitter than the sweet—but it will all come out right in time."

She touched his hand.

"Do you like mignonette?" she asked. "I've brought you some."

"I love it!" said he with boyish impetuosity. "I had a bed of it last—no, I mean the summer before last—before I was—before I went to work for Isom."

She took the flowers from her bosom and placed them in his hand. The scent of them was in his nostrils, stirring memories of his old days of simple poverty, of days in the free fields. Again he turned his face toward the window, the little flowers clutched in his hand. His breast heaved as if he fought in the deep waters of his soul against some ignoble weakness.

She moved a little nearer, and reached timidly through the bars with the breathless quiet of one who offers a caress to a sleeper. Her finger-tips touched his arm.

"Joe," said she, as if appealing in pity to him for permission to share his agony.

He lifted the flowers to his lips and kissed the stems where her hand had clasped them; then bowed his head, his strong shoulders against the bars.

"Joe!" Her voice was a whisper in his ear, more than pity in it, so it seemed to him in the revelation of that moment; more than entreaty, more than consolation.

Her hand was on his arm; he turned to her, shaking the fallen locks of his wild hair back from his brow. Then her hand was in his, and there was a warm mist, as of summer clouds, before his eyes. Her face was before him, and near—so near. Not red like the bitter-sweet, but pale as the winter dawn. Her eyes were wide, her chin was lifted, and he was straining her to him with the jail door bars against his breast.

Love comes that way, and death; and the blow of sorrow; and the wrench of life's last bitter pang. Only life is slow; tedious and laggard with its burdens and its gleams.

He remembered in a moment; the pressure of the bars against his breast recalled him to his sad estate. He released her hand and fell back a step from her, a sharp cry on his lips as if he had seen her crushed and mangled just beyond his reach.

"I didn't mean to do that, Alice; I didn't mean to do that!" said he, dropping to his knees before her as if struck down by a stunning blow. He bowed his head in contrite humiliation.

"I forgot where I was, Alice; I forgot!"

There was no displeasure in her face as she stood panting before the barred door, her hands to her heaving breast, her head thrown back. Her lips were parted; there was a light of exaltation in her eyes, as of one who has felt the benediction of a great and lasting joy. She put her hand through the bars again, and touched his bowed head.

"Don't do that, Joe," said she.

The sheriff's key sounded in the lock of the corridor gate.

"Time's up," he called.

"All right; I'm coming," Alice returned.

Joe stood, weak and trembling. He felt as if he had, in the heat of some great passion, rashly risked life, and more than life; that he had only now dragged his battered body back to the narrow, precarious ledge from which he had leaped, and that safety was not his.

"I must go now," said she, soft and low and in steady voice. "Good-bye."

She gave him her hand, and he clung to it like a nestling fastening upon the last branch interposing between it and destruction.

"I forgot where I was," said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened fingers to meet and enfold.

"I must go now," said she again. Her feet sounded in the corridor as she ran away. A little way along she stopped. She was beyond his sight, but her voice sounded near him when she called back "Good-bye!"

She had not gone in anger nor displeasure, thought he, getting hand of his confused senses after a while, standing as she had left him, the flowers in his hand. Strangely exulting, strangely thrilling, mounting a moment like an eagle, plunging down now like a stone, Joe walked his cell.

What had he done, drawn on by that which he had read in her eyes in that poignant moment! In jail, locked behind a grated door of steel, he had taken her hand and drawn her to him until the shock of the bars had called back his manhood. He had taken advantage of her friendship and sympathy.

Prison was no place for love; a man locked in jail charged with a crime had no right to think of it. It was base of him, and unworthy. Still—mounting again in a swift, delicious flight—it was sweet to know what her eyes had told him, sweeter to rest assured that she had not left him in scorn. Down again, a falling clod. Unless he had misinterpreted them in the ignorance of his untutored heart. Yet, that is a language that needs no lexicon, he knew.

Who is so simple, indeed, as to be unaware of that? How different this passion from that which Ollie's uncovered bosom had stirred; how he burned with shame at the memory of that day!

Up and down he strode the morning through, his long, thin legs now spare in his boot-tops, his wide, bony shoulders sharp through his coat. The strong light fell on his gaunt face as he turned toward the window; shadows magnified its hollows when he turned toward the door. Now that the panic of it had left him, the sweetness of it remained.

How soft her hand was, how her yielding body swayed in his arm! How delicious her breath was on his face; how near her eyes, speaking to him, and her lips; how near her parted, warm, red lips!

He took up the Book, and turned with trembling hands to a place that he remembered well. There was something that he had read, not feeling, not understanding, words of which came back to him now. The Songs of Songs, Which is Solomon's.

Ah, the Song of Songs! The music of it now was written in his heart. It was not the song in glorification and exaltation of the church that the translators had captioned it; not a song full of earthly symbols meant to represent spiritual passions. Joe had read it, time and again, in that application, and it had fallen flavorless upon his understanding. No; it was the song of a strong man to the woman whom he loved.

And the music of it, old but ever new in its human appeal, now was written in his heart.

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.... Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved....

Ah, until the day break!

In his rapt exaltation the boy's face beamed as he strode swiftly the length of his cell. It would not be long until daybreak now. The judge would understand him, and would not press a man to tell what he had delicate reasons for concealing, when the concealment could bring harm to nobody, but boundless good to one weak creature who must wither otherwise in the blaze of shame.

He remembered the strong face and the long iron-gray hair of Judge Maxwell; only a little while ago Joe had given him some apples which he had stopped to admire as he drove past Isom's orchard in his sagging, mud-splashed, old buggy. He was a good man; the uprightness of his life spoke from his face. Judge Maxwell was a man to understand.

Poor Ollie; poor weak, shrinking Ollie! Her frightened eyes glowed hot in his memory of the day of the inquest, carrying to him their appeal. Poor, mistaken, unguided Ollie! He would protect her to the last, as he had done at the beginning, and trust and hope that the judge, and Alice, and the colonel, and the whole world, would understand in due and proper time.



CHAPTER XIV

DESERTED

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 human eye never beheld in nature, out of soft pine-wood. He had taken up that diversion shortly after the last of his afflictions, blindness, fell upon him and, as white pine was cheap, the superintendent of the institution indulged him without stint.

Uncle John, as he was called long years before the hard-riding world threw him, was a preacher back in the days of his youth, middling manhood and prosperity. He had ridden the country in the Campbellite faith, bringing hundreds into the fold, with a voice as big as a bull's, and a long beard, which he wore buttoned under his vest in winter. And now in his speechlessness, darkness, and silence, he still preached in his way, carving out the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and female figures of hideous mien, the signification of which nobody rightly knew.

Uncle John had a little slate upon which he wrote his wants, but nobody had discovered any way of communicating with him save by taking his hand and guiding it to the object for which he had asked. For a long time he had written the one word "Paint" on his slate. That was the beginning of his use of it, when one word was all that he could get on a side of it at a time. After his fingers had become sensitive through his new art of whittling and feeling, he improved his writing, until he made it plain that he wanted paint to adorn his carved figures, so they could be sold.

It was the hope of the poor old soul that he could whittle himself out of the poorhouse, and live free and independent upon the grotesque productions of his knife, if they would give him paint to make them attractive, and thus get a start. He did not know how fantastic and ridiculous they were, having only his own touch to guide him to judgment of their merits.

Perhaps he was no less reasonable in this belief than certain painters, musicians, and writers, who place their own blind value upon the craft of their hands and brains, and will not set them aside for any jury that the world can impanel.

Uncle John never came to realize his hopes of freedom, any more than he ever came to realize the uselessness of paint for his angels when he had no eyes for applying it. He whittled on, in melancholy dejection, ring upon ring in his endless chains of rings, forging in bitter irony the emblems of bondage, when his old heart so longed to be free.

It was a bright day in the life of Uncle John Owens, then, when Ollie's lawyer called at the poorhouse and placed under his hands some slender slips of cardboard bearing raised letters, the A B C of his age.

His bearded old face shone like a window in which a light has been struck as his fluttering fingers ran over the letters. He fumbled excitedly for his slate which hung about his neck, and his hand trembled as he wrote:

"More—book—more."

It had been an experiment, the lawyer having doubted whether Uncle John's untrained fingers, dulled by age, could pick out the letters, large as they were. He had nothing more to offer, therefore, and no way of answering the appeal. But that night an order for the New Testament in raised characters for the blind went out from Shelbyville.

Judge Little was making no progress in establishing the will. Nobody had come forward in answer to his advertisements in the city papers, claiming for himself the distinction of being Isom Chase's son. But the judge gave Ollie to understand, in spite of his quiescence while he searched for the heir, that the courts must settle the question. If there were fees to be had out of that estate, Judge Little was the man to get them.

Meantime, in his cell in the county jail, Joe Newbolt was bearing the heaviest penance of his life. Alice had not come again. Two visiting days had passed, and there would be no more before the date of the trial, which was set for the following Monday. But since that dun morning when she had given him the mignonette, and he had drawn her unresisting body to the barrier of his prison door, she had visited him no more.

Joe reproached himself for it. He accused himself of having offended beyond forgiveness. In the humiliation which settled upon him, he wasted like water in the sun. The mignonette which she had given him withered, dried; its perfume vanished, its blossoms turned gray. She came no more. What did it matter if they convicted him before the judge, said he, now that Alice had condemned him in her heart. He lamented that he had blundered into such deep offending. His untutored heart had seen only the reflection of his own desire in her eyes that day. She did not care for him. It was only pity that he had distorted into love.

He had inquired about her, timidly, of the sheriff, who had looked at him with a slow wink, then formed his mouth into an egg-shaped aperture and held it so an exasperating while, as if he meant to whistle. The sheriff's clownish behavior nettled Joe, for he was at a loss to understand what he meant.

"I thought maybe she'd sent over some books," said Joe, blushing like a hollyhock.

"Books!" said the sheriff, with a grunt.

"Yes, sir," Joe answered, respectfully.

"Huh, she never sent no books," said the sheriff, turning away.

After a little he came back and stood before Joe's door, with his long legs far apart, studying the prisoner calculatively, as a farmer stands when he estimates the weight of a hog.

"Cree-mo-nee!" said he.

He laughed then, much to Joe's confusion, and totally beyond his comprehension. The sheriff left him with that. From the passage his laugh came back.

The day was Friday; Joe plucked up a little hope when he heard the sheriff conducting somebody to the corridor gate. It was Colonel Price, who had exercised his political influence over the sheriff and induced him to set aside his new regulations for the day. The colonel made apologies to Joe for what might seem his lack of interest in his welfare.

Joe inquired of him concerning Alice, with respectful dignity. She was well, said the colonel, and asked to be remembered. What else the colonel said on that occasion Joe did not recall. All that he could think of was that Alice had desired to be remembered.

What an ironical message to send him, thought Joe. If she only had come herself, and given him the assurance with her eyes that there was no stored censure, no burning reproach; if she had come, and quieted the doubt, the uncertainty, of his self-tortured soul. His case had become secondary beside Alice. The colonel talked of it, but Joe wondered if the mignonette in her garden was dead. The colonel shook his head gravely when he went away from the jail that day. It was plain that the boy was suffering with that load on his mind and the uncertainty of the outcome pressing upon him. He mentioned it to Alice.

"I think we'd better try to get him another lawyer," said the colonel. "Hammer never will be equal to that job. It will be more the size of Judge Burns, or one of the old heads. That boy's in a pickle, Alice, and a mighty tight one, at that."

"But he's innocent—you don't doubt that?" said she.

"Not for a minute," the colonel declared. "I guess I should have been looking after him closer, but that picture intervened between us. He's wearing away to a shadow, chafing and pining there in jail, poor chap."

"Do you think he'll consent to your employing another lawyer for him?" she asked, searching his face wistfully.

"I don't know; he's so set in the notion of loyalty to Hammer—just as if anybody could hurt Hammer's feelings! If the boy will consent to it, I'll hire Judge Burns at my own expense."

"I don't suppose he will," sighed she.

"No, I reckon not, his notions are so high-flown," the colonel admitted, with evident pride in the lofty bearing of the widow's son.

"He's longing for a run over the hills," said she. "He told me he was."

"A year of it in there would kill him," the colonel said. "We must get him a lawyer who can disentangle him. I never saw anybody go down like that boy has gone down in the last month. It's like taking a wild Indian out of the woods and putting him in a cage."

The colonel put aside the corn picture for the day, and went out to confer with Judge Burns, a local lawyer who had gained a wide reputation in the defense of criminal cases. He was a doubly troubled man when he returned home that evening, for Joe had been firm in his refusal either to dismiss Hammer or admit another to his defense. In the library he had found Alice, downcast and gloomy, on the margin of tears.

"Why, honey, you mustn't mope around this way," he remonstrated gently. "What is it—what's gone wrong with my little manager?"

She raised up from huddling her head against her arms on the table, pushed her fallen hair back from her eyes and gave him a wan smile.

"I just felt so lonely and depressed somehow," said she, placing her hand on his where it lay on the table. "Never mind me, for I'll be all right. What did he say?"

"Judge Burns?"

"Joe."

The colonel drew a chair near and sat down, flinging out his hand with impatient gesture.

"I can't do anything with him," said he. "He says one lawyer will do as well as another, and Hammer's doing all that can be done. 'They'll believe me or they'll not believe me, colonel, and that's all there is to it,' says he, 'and the best lawyer in the world can't change that.' And I don't know but he's right, too," the colonel sighed. "He's got to come out with that story, every word of it, or there'll never be a jury picked in the whole State of Missouri that'll take any stock in his testimony."

"It will be a terrible thing for his mother if they don't believe him," said she.

"We'll do all that he'll allow us to do for him, we can't do any more. It's a gloomy outlook, a gloomy case all through. It was a bad piece of business when that mountain woman bound him out to old Isom Chase, to take his kicks and curses and live on starvation rations. He's the last boy in the world that you'd conceive of being bound out; he don't fit the case at all."

"No, he doesn't," said she, reflectively.

"But don't let the melancholy thing settle on you and disturb you, child. He'll get out of it—or he'll not—one way or the other, I reckon. It isn't a thing for you to take to heart and worry over. I never should have taken you to that gloomy old jail to see him, at all."

"I can't forget him there—I'll always see him there!" she shuddered. "He's above them all—they'll never understand him, never in this world!"

She got up, her hair hanging upon her shoulders, and left him abruptly, as if she had discovered something that lay in her heart. Colonel Price sat looking after her, his back very straight, his hand upon his knee.

"Well!" said he. Then, after a long ruminative spell: "Well!"

That same hour Hammer was laboring with his client in the jail, as he had labored fruitlessly before, in an endeavor to induce him to impart to him the thing that he had concealed at the coroner's inquest into Isom Chase's death. Hammer assured him that it would not pass beyond him in case that it had no value in establishing his innocence.

"Mr. Hammer, sir," said Joe, with unbending dignity and firmness, "if the information you ask of me was mine to give, freely and honorably, I'd give it. You can see that. Maybe something will turn up between now and Monday that will make a change, but if not, you'll have to do the best you can for me the way it stands. Maybe I oughtn't expect you to go into the court and defend me, seeing that I can't help you any more than I'm doing. If you feel that you'd better drop out of the case, you're free to do it, without any hard feelings on my part, sir."

Hammer had no intention of dropping the case, hopeless as he felt the defense to be. Even defeat would be glorious, and loss profitable, for his connection with the defense would sound his name from one end of the state to the other.

"I wouldn't desert you in the hour of your need, Joe, for anything they could name," said Hammer, with significant suggestion.

His manner, more than his words, carried the impression that they had named sums, recognizing in him an insuperable barrier to the state's case, but that he had put his tempters aside with high-born scorn.

"Thank you," said Joe.

"But if Missis Chase was mixed up in it any way, I want you to tell me, Joe," he pressed.

Joe said nothing. He looked as stiff and hard as one of the iron hitching-posts in front of the court-house, thought Hammer, the side of his face turned to the lawyer, who measured it with quick eyes.

"Was she, Joe?" whispered Hammer, leaning forward, his face close to the bars.

"The coroner asked me that," replied Joe, harshly.

This unyielding quality of his client was baffling to Hammer, who was of the opinion that a good fatherly kick might break the crust of his reserve. Hammer had guessed the answer according to his own thick reasoning, and not very pellucid morals.

"Well, if you take the stand, Joe, they'll make you tell it then," Hammer warned him. "You'd better tell me in advance, so I can advise you how much to say."

"I'll have to get on somehow without your advice, thank you sir, Mr. Hammer, when it comes to how much to say," said Joe.

"There's not many lawyers—and I'll tell you that right now in a perfectly plain and friendly way—that'd go ahead with your case under the conditions," said Hammer. "But as I told you, I'll stick to you and see you through. I wash my hands of any blame for the case, Joe, if it don't turn out exactly the way you expect."

Joe saw him leave without regret, for Hammer's insistence seemed to him inexcusably vulgar. All men could not be like him, reflected Joe, his hope leaping forward to Judge Maxwell, whom he must soon confront.

Joe tossed the night through with his longing for Alice, which gnawed him like hunger and would not yield to sleep, for in his dreams his heart went out after her; he heard her voice caressing his name. He woke with the feeling that he must put the thought of Alice away from him, and frame in his mind what he should say when it came his turn to stand before Judge Maxwell and tell his story. If by some hinted thing, some shade of speech, some qualification which a gentleman would grasp and understand, he might convey his reason to the judge, he felt that he must come clear.

He pondered it a long time, and the face of the judge rose before him, and the eyes were brown and the hair in soft wavelets above a white forehead, and Alice stood in judgment over him. So it always ended; it was before Alice that he must plead and justify himself. She was his judge, his jury, and his world.

It was mid-afternoon when Mrs. Newbolt arrived for her last visit before the trial. She came down to his door in her somber dress, tall, bony and severe, thinner of face herself than she had been before, her eyes bright with the affection for her boy which her tongue never put into words. Her shoes were muddy, and the hem of her skirt draggled, for, high as she had held it in her heavy tramp, it had become splashed by the pools in the soft highway.

"Mother, you shouldn't have come today over the bad roads," said Joe with affectionate reproof.

"Lands, what's a little mud!" said she, putting down a small bundle which she bore. "Well, it'll be froze up by tomorrow, I reckon, it's turnin' sharp and cold."

She looked at Joe anxiously, every shadow in his worn face carving its counterpart in her heart. There was no smile of gladness on her lips, for smiles had been so long apart from her life that the nerves which commanded them had grown stiff and hard.

"Yes," said Joe, taking up her last words, "winter will be here in a little while now. I'll be out then, Mother, to lay in wood for you. It won't be long now."

"Lord bless you, son!" said she, the words catching in her throat, tears rising to her eyes and standing so heavy that she must wipe them away.

"It will all be settled next week," Joe told her confidently.

"I hope they won't put it off no more," said she wearily.

"No; Hammer says they're sure to go ahead this time."

"Ollie drove over yesterday evening and brought your things from Isom's," said she, lifting the bundle from the floor, forcing it to him between the bars. "I brought you a couple of clean shirts, for I knew you'd want one for tomorrow."

"Yes, Mother, I'm glad you brought them," said Joe.

"Ollie, she said she never would make you put in the rest of your time there if she had anything to say about it. But she said if Judge Little got them letters of administration he was after she expected he'd try to hold us to it, from what he said."

"No matter, Mother."

"And Ollie said if she ever did come into Isom's property she'd make us a deed to our place."

Mrs. Newbolt's face bore a little gleam of hope when she told him this. Joe looked at her kindly.

"She could afford to, Mother," said he, "it was paid for in interest on that loan to Isom."

"But Isom, he never would 'a' give in to that," said she. "Your pap he paid twelve per cent interest on that loan for sixteen years."

"I figured it all up, Mother," said he.

There was nothing for her to sit on in the corridor; she stood holding to the bars to take some of the weight from her tired feet.

"I don't want to hurry you off, Mother," said Joe, "but I hate to see you standing there all tired out. If the sheriff was a gentleman he'd fetch you a chair. I don't suppose there'd be any use in asking him."

"Never mind, Joe, it takes more than a little walk like that to play me out."

"You'd better stop in at Colonel Price's and rest a while before you start back," he suggested.

"Maybe I will," said she.

She plunged her hand into the black draw-string bag which she carried on her arm, rummaging among its contents.

"That little rambo tree you planted a couple of years ago had two apples on it," she told him, "but I never noticed 'em all summer, the leaves was so thick and it was such a little feller, anyhow."

"It is a little one to begin bearing," said Joe, with a boy's interest in a thing that he has done with his own hand turning out to be something.

"Yes; and I aimed to leave them on the tree till you could see them, but the hard wind yesterday shook 'em off. Here they are, I've fetched 'em to you, son."

Joe took the apples, the recollection of the high hopes which he had centered around that little apple-tree when he planted it coming back to him like a scented wind at dawn. He had planned to make that tree the nucleus of an orchard, which was to grow and spread until it covered the old home place, the fields adjoining, and lifted the curse of poverty from the Newbolt name. It had been a boyish plan which his bondage to Isom Chase had set back.

He had not given it up for a day while he labored in Chase's fields. When he became his own man he always intended to take it up and put it through. Now, there in his hand, was the first fruit of his big intention, and in that moment Joe reviewed his old pleasant dream.

He saw again as he had pictured it before, to the relief of many a long, hot day in Isom's fields, his thousand trees upon the hills, the laden wagons rolling to the station with his barrels of fruit, some of it to go to far lands across the sea. He saw again the stately house with its white columns and deep porticoes, in the halls of which his fancy had reveled many a happy hour, and he saw—the bars of his stone cell and his mother's work-hardened hands clasping them, while she looked at him with the pain of her sad heart speaking from her eyes. A heavy tear rolled down his hollow cheek and fell upon the apples in his hand.

For the pain of prison he had not wept, nor for its shame. The vexing circumstance of being misunderstood, the dread threat of the future had not claimed a tear. But for a dream which had sprung like a sweet flower in his young heart and had passed away like a mist, he wept.

His mother knew nothing about that blasted dream; the gloom of his cell concealed his tears. He rubbed the fruit along his coat sleeve, as if to make it shine, as a fruiterer polishes the apples in his stall.

"All right, Mother, I'm glad you brought them," he said, although there was no gladness in his voice.

"I planned to fetch you in some fried chicken today, too," said she, "but the pesky rooster I had under the tub got away when I went to take him out. If you'd like some, Joe, I'll come back tomorrow."

"No, no; don't you tramp over here tomorrow, Mother," he admonished, "and don't bother about the chicken. I don't seem to have any appetite any more. But you wait till I'm out of here a day or two; then you'll see me eat."

"Well, then I guess I'll be goin' on back, Joe; and bright and early Monday morning I'll be on hand at the court. Maybe we'll be able to go home together that evenin', son."

"Hammer says it will take two or three days," Joe told her, "but I don't see what they can do to make it string out that long. I could tell them all about it in ten minutes. So we mustn't put our hopes too high on Monday, Mother."

"I'll beseech the Lord all day tomorrow, son, to open their ears that they may hear," said she solemnly. "And when the time comes to speak tell it all, Joe, tell it all!"

"Yes, Mother, when the time comes," said he gently.

"Tell 'em all Isom said to you, son," she charged.

"Don't you worry over that now, Mother."

She felt that her son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly. "Well, I'll be rackin' off home," she said.

"If you stop at the colonel's to rest a while, Mother—and I wish you would, for you're all tired out—you might hand this book back to Miss Price. She loaned it to me. Tell her I read it long ago, and I'd have sent it back before now, only I thought she might come after it herself some time."

His mother turned to him, a curious expression in her face.

"Don't she come any more, Joe?"

"She's been busy with other things, I guess," said he.

"Maybe," she allowed, with a feeling of resentment against the book on account of its cold, unfriendly owner.

She had almost reached the corridor gate when Joe called after her.

"No, don't tell her that," he requested. "Don't tell her anything. Just hand it back, please, Mother."

"Whatever you say, Joe."

Joe heard the steel gate close after her and the sheriff's voice loud above his mother's as they went toward the door.

Loyal as he was to his mother, the thought of her went out with her, and in her place stood the slender figure of youth, her lips "like a thread of scarlet." One day more to wait for the event of his justification and vindication, or at least the beginning of it, thought Joe.

Ah, if Alice only would come to lighten the interval!



CHAPTER XV

THE STATE VS. NEWBOLT

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 gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and close around the building.

In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of these spreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a giant tree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place. It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fine old days before the war.

There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one of the logs of the original court-house, built in that square more than sixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for the murder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summer days, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirring incidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut in the tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recall memories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.

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 pronounced upon them, had kicked it in protest as they passed. 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 balustrade 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 passed. 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 passed 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 passed 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 horsemen 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 spunk 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-shells.

"Gosh m' granny!" said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stood a moment after placing a pitcher of water and a glass 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 shag-barked, sharp-shinned, 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 Township 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; nobody 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, assured, to enjoy the day.

It was a delightfully horrid thing to be tried for murder, they said, even though one was obscure and nobody, 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 shining, 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 unobtrusive in her rusty black dress, which looked as if it were made of storm-streaked umbrellas, that nobody 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, shaggy 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 pronounced in loud voice this formula:

"Oy's, oy's, oy's! The hon'r'bl' circuit court of the humteenth 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 attitude 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 mass which we call the public. Out of the mass 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 circumstance. 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 refreshing 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 assist 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.

Judge Maxwell was tall and large of frame, from which the study and abstemiousness of his life had worn all superfluous flesh. His face, cleanly shaved, was expressive of the scholarly attainments which made his decisions a national standard. The judge's eyes were bushed over with great, gray brows, the one forbidding cast in his countenance; they looked out upon those who came for judgment before him through a pair of spring-clamp spectacles which seemed to ride precariously upon his large, bony nose. The glasses were tied to a slender black braid, which he wore looped about his neck.

His hair was long, iron-gray, and thick; he wore it brushed straight back from his brow, without a parting or a break. It lay in place so smoothly and persistently through all the labor of his long days, that strangers were sometimes misled into the belief that it was not his own. This peculiar fashion of dressing his hair, taken with the length and leanness of his jaw, gave the judge a cast of aquiline severeness which his gray eyes belied when they beamed over the tops of his glasses at floundering young counsel or timid witness.

Yet they could shoot darts of fire, as many a rash lawyer who had fallen under their censure could bear witness. At such moments the judge had a peculiar habit of drawing up his long back and seemingly to distend himself with all the dignity which his cumulative years and honors had endured, and of bowing his neck to make the focus of his eyes more direct as he peered above his rimless glasses. He did not find it necessary to reprimand an attorney often, never more than once, but these occasions never were forgotten. In his twenty-five years' service on the bench, he never had been reversed.

Joe felt a revival of hope again under the influence of these preparations for the trial. Perhaps Alice was there, somewhere among the people back in the room, he thought. And the colonel, also, and maybe Morgan. Who could tell? There was no use in abandoning hope when he was just where he could see a little daylight.

Joe sat up again, and lifted his head with new confidence. His mother sat beside him, watching everything with a sharpness which seemed especially bent on seeing that Joe was given all his rights, and that nothing was omitted nor slighted that might count in his favor.

She watched Hammer, and Captain Taylor; she measured Sam Lucas, the prosecutor, and she weighed the judge. When Hammer did something that pleased her, she nodded; when the prosecutor interposed, or seemed to be blocking the progress of the case, she shook her head in severe censure.

And now Joe came in for his first taste of the musty and ancient savor of the law. He had hoped that morning to walk away free at evening, or at least to have met the worst that was to come, chancing it that Morgan failed to appear and give him a hand. But he saw the hours waste away with the most exasperating fiddling, fussing and scratching over unprofitable straw.

What Hammer desired in a juryman, the prosecuting attorney was hotly against, and what pleased the state's attorney seemed to give Hammer a spasmodic chill. Instead of selecting twelve intelligent men, the most intelligent of the sixty empaneled, both Hammer and the prosecutor seemed determined to choose the most dense.

That day's sweating labor resulted in the selection of four jurymen. Hammer seemed cheered. He said he had expected to exhaust the panel and get no more than two, at the best. Now it seemed as if they might secure the full complement without drawing another panel, and that would save them at least four days. That must have been an exceedingly lucky haul of empty heads, indeed.

Joe could not see any reason for elation. The prospect of freedom—or the worst—had withdrawn so far that there was not even a pin-point of daylight in the gloom. Alice had not shown her face. If she had come at all, she had withheld herself from his hungry eyes. His heart was as bleak that night as the mind of the densest juryman agreed upon between Hammer and the attorney for the state.

Next day, to the surprise of everybody, the jury was completed. And then there followed, on the succeeding morning, a recital by the prosecuting attorney of what he proposed and expected to prove in substantiation of the charge that Joe Newbolt had shot and killed Isom Chase; and Hammer's no shorter statement of what he was prepared to show to the contrary.

Owing to the unprecedented interest, and the large number of people who had driven in from the country, Judge Maxwell unbent from his hard conditions on that day. He instructed Captain Taylor to admit spectators to standing-room along the walls, but to keep the aisles between the benches clear.

This concession provided for at least a hundred more onlookers and listeners, who stood forgetful of any ache in their shanks throughout the long and dragging proceedings well satisfied, believing that the coming sensations would repay them for any pangs of inconvenience they might suffer.

It was on the afternoon of the third day of the trial that Sol Greening, first witness for the state, was called.

Sol retailed again, in his gossipy way, and with immense enjoyment of his importance, the story of the tragedy as he had related it at the inquest. Sam Lucas gave him all the rope he wanted, even led him into greater excursions than Sol had planned. Round-about excursions, to be sure, and inconsequential in effect, but they all led back to the tragic picture of Joe Newbolt standing beside the dead body of Isom Chase, his hat in his hand, as if he had been interrupted on the point of escape.

Sol seemed a wonderfully acute man for the recollection of details, but there was one thing that had escaped his memory. He said he did not remember whether, when he knocked on the kitchen door, anybody told him to come in or not. He was of the opinion, to the best of his knowledge and belief—the words being supplied by the prosecutor—that he just knocked, and stood there blowing a second or two, like a horse that had been put to a hard run, and then went in without being bidden. Sol believed that was the way of it; he had no recollection of anybody telling him to come in.

When it came Hammer's turn to question the witness, he rose with an air of patronizing assurance. He called Sol by his first name, in easy familiarity, although he never had spoken to him before that day. He proceeded as if he intended to establish himself in the man's confidence by gentle handling, and in that manner cause him to confound, refute and entangle himself by admissions made in gratitude.

But Sol was a suspicious customer. He hesitated and he hummed, backed and sidled, and didn't know anything more than he had related. The bag of money which had been found with Isom's body had been introduced by the state for identification by Sol. Hammer took up the matter with a sudden turn toward sharpness and belligerency.

"You say that this is the same sack of money that was there on the floor with Isom Chase's body when you entered the room?" he asked.

"That's it," nodded Sol.

"Tell this jury how you know it's the same one!" ordered Hammer, in stern voice.

"Well, I seen it," said Sol.

"Oh, yes, you saw it. Well, did you go over to it and make a mark on it so you'd know it again?"

"No, I never done that," admitted Sol.

"Don't you know the banks are full of little sacks of money like that?" Hammer wanted to know.

"I reckon maybe they air," Sol replied.

"And this one might be any one of a thousand like it, mightn't it, Sol?"

"Well, I don't reckon it could. That's the one Isom had."

"Did you step over where the dead body was at and heft it?"

"'Course I never," said Sol.

"Did you open it and count the money in it, or tie a string or something onto it so you'd know it when you saw it again?"

"No, I never," said Sol sulkily.

"Then how do you know this is it?"

"I tell you I seen it," persisted Sol.

"Oh, you seen it!" repeated Hammer, sweeping the jury a cunning look as if to apprise them that he had found out just what he wanted to know, and that upon that simple admission he was about to turn the villainy of Sol Greening inside out for them to see with their own intelligent eyes.

"Yes, I said I seen it," maintained Sol, bristling up a little.

"Yes, I heard you say it, and now I want you to tell this jury how you know!"

Hammer threw the last word into Sol's face with a slam that made him jump. Sol turned red under the whiskers, around the whiskers, and all over the uncovered part of him. He shifted in his chair; he swallowed.

"Well, I don't just know," said he.

"No, you don't—just—know!" sneered Hammer, glowing in oily triumph. He looked at the jury confidentially, as on the footing of a shrewd man with his equally shrewd audience.

Then he took up the old rifle, and Isom's bloody coat and shirt, which were also there as exhibits, and dressed Sol down on all of them, working hard to create the impression in the minds of the jurors that Sol Greening was a born liar, and not to be depended on in the most trivial particular.

Hammer worked himself up into a sweat and emitted a great deal of perfume of barberish—and barbarous—character, and glanced around the court-room with triumph in his eyes and satisfaction at the corners of his mouth.

He came now to the uncertainty of Sol's memory on the matter of being bidden to enter the kitchen when he knocked. Sol had now passed from doubt to certainty. Come to think it over, said he, nobody had said a word when he knocked at that door. He remembered now that it was as still inside the house as if everybody was away.

Mrs. Greening was standing against the wall, having that moment returned to the room from ministering to her daughter's baby. She held the infant in her arms, waiting Sol's descent from the witness-chair so she might settle down in her place without disturbing the proceedings. When she heard her husband make this positive declaration, her mouth fell open and her eyes widened in surprise.

"Why Sol," she spoke up reprovingly, "you told me Joe——"

It had taken the prosecuting attorney that long to glance around and spring to his feet. There his voice, in a loud appeal to the court for the protection of his sacred rights, drowned that of mild Mrs. Greening. The judge rapped, the sheriff rapped; Captain Taylor, from his post at the door, echoed the authoritative sound.

Hammer abruptly ceased his questioning of Sol, after the judge had spoken a few crisp words of admonishment, not directed in particular at Mrs. Greening, but more to the public at large, regarding the decorum of the court. Sam Lucas thereupon took Sol in hand again, and drew him on to replace his former doubtful statement by his later conclusion. As Sol left the witness-chair Hammer smiled. He handed Mrs. Greening's name to the clerk, and requested a subpoena for her as a witness for the defense.

Sol's son Dan was the next witness, and Hammer put him through a similar course of sprouts. Judge Maxwell allowed Hammer to disport uncurbed until it became evident that, if given his way, the barber-lawyer would drag the trial out until Joe was well along in middle life. He then admonished Hammer that there were bounds fixed for human existence, and that the case must get on.

Hammer was a bit uppish and resentful. He stood on his rights; he invoked the sacred constitution; he referred to the revised statutes; he put his hand into his coat and spread his legs to make a memorable protest.

Judge Maxwell took him in hand very kindly and led safely past the point of explosion with a smile of indulgence. With that done, the state came to Constable Bill Frost and his branching mustaches, which he had trimmed up and soaped back quite handsomely.

To his own credit and the surprise of the lawyers who were watching the case, Hammer made a great deal of the point of Joe having gone to Frost, voluntarily and alone, to summon him to the scene of the tragedy. Frost admitted that he had believed Joe's story until Sol Greening had pointed out to him the suspicious circumstances.

"So you have to have somebody else to do your thinkin' for you, do you?" said Hammer. "Well, you're a fine officer of the law and a credit to this state!"

"I object!" said the prosecuting attorney, standing up in his place, very red around the eyes.

The judge smiled, and the court-room tittered. The sheriff looked back over his shoulder and rapped the table for order.

"Comment is unnecessary, Mr. Hammer," said the judge. "Proceed with the case."

And so that weary day passed in trivial questioning on both sides, trivial bickerings, and waste of time, to the great edifications of everybody but Joe and his mother, and probably the judge. Ten of the state's forty witnesses were disposed of, and Hammer was as moist as a jug of cold water in a shock of wheat.

When the sheriff started to take Joe back to jail, the lad stood for a moment searching the breaking-up and moving assembly with longing eyes. All day he had sat with his back to the people, not having the heart to look around with that shameful handcuff and chain binding his arm to the chair. If Alice had been there, or Colonel Price, neither had come forward to wish him well.

There were Ollie and her mother, standing as they had risen from their bench, waiting for the crowd ahead of them to set in motion toward the door, and here and there a face from his own neighborhood. But Alice was not among them. She had withdrawn her friendship from him in his darkest hour.

Neither had Morgan appeared to put his shoulder under the hard-pressing load and relieve him of its weight. Day by day it was growing heavier; but a little while remained until it must crush out his hope forever. Certainly, there was a way out without Morgan; there was a way open to him leading back into the freedom of the world, where he might walk again with the sunlight on his face. A word would make it clear.

But the sun would never strike again into his heart if he should go back to it under that coward's reprieve, and Alice—Alice would scorn his memory.



CHAPTER XVII

THE BLOW OF A FRIEND

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 to in fact. When he announced that the state rested, there was a murmur and rustling in the room, and audibly expressed wonderment over what the public thought to be a grave blunder on Sam Lucas's part.

The state had not called the widow of Isom Chase to the stand to give testimony against the man accused of her husband's murder. The public could not make it out. What did it mean? Did the prosecutor hold her more of an enemy than a friend to his efforts to convict the man whose hand had made her a widow? Whispers went around, grave faces were drawn, wise heads wagged. Public charity for Ollie began to falter.

"Him and that woman," men said, nodding toward Joe, sitting pale and inscrutable beside his blustering lawyer.

The feeling of impending sensation became more acute when it circulated through the room, starting from Captain Taylor at the inner door, that Ollie had been summoned as a witness for the defense; Captain Taylor had served the subpoena himself.

"Well, in that case, Sam Lucas knew what he was doing," people allowed. "Just wait!" It was as good as a spirituous stimulant to their lagging interest. "Just you wait till Sam Lucas gets hold of her," they said.

Hammer began the defense by calling his character witnesses and establishing Joe's past reputation for "truth and veracity and general uprightness."

There was no question in the character which Joe's neighbors gave him. They spoke warmly of his past record among them, of his fidelity to his word and obligation, and of the family record, which Hammer went into with free and unhampered hand.

The prosecutor passed these witnesses with serene confidence. He probably believed that his case was already made, people said, or else he was reserving his fire for Isom's widow, who, it seemed to everybody, had turned against nature and her own interests in allying herself with the accused.

The morning was consumed in the examination of these character witnesses, Hammer finishing with the last of them just before the midday adjournment. The sheriff was preparing to remove the prisoner. Joe's hand had been released from the arm of the chair, and the officer had fastened the iron around his wrist. The proceeding always struck Joe with an overwhelming wave of degradation and now he stood with bowed head and averted face.

"Come on," said the sheriff, goggling down at him with froggish eyes from his vantage on the dais where the witness-chair stood, his long neck on a slant like a giraffe's. The sheriff took great pleasure in the proceeding of attaching the irons. It was his one central moment in the eyes of the throng.

Joe looked up to march ahead of the sheriff out of the room, and his eyes met the eyes of Alice. She was not far away, and the cheer of their quick message was like a spoken word. She was wearing the same gray dress that she had worn on that day of days, with the one bright feather in her bonnet, and she smiled, nodding to him. And then the swirl of bobbing heads and moving bodies came between them and she was lost.

He looked for her again as the sheriff pushed him along toward the door, but the room was in such confusion that he could not single her out. The judge had gone out through his tall, dark door, and the court-room was no longer an awesome place to those who had gathered for the trial. Men put their hats on their heads and lit their pipes, and bit into their twists and plugs of tobacco and emptied their mouths of the juices as they went slowly toward the door.

Mrs. Greening was the first witness called by Hammer after the noon recess. Hammer quickly discovered his purpose in calling her as being nothing less than that of proving by her own mouth that her husband, Sol, was a gross and irresponsible liar.

Hammer went over the whole story of the tragedy—Mrs. Greening having previously testified to all these facts as a witness for the state—from the moment that Sol had called her out of bed and taken her to the Chase home to support the young widow in her hour of distraction and fear. By slow and lumbering ways he led her, like a blind horse floundering along a heavy road, through the front door, up the stairs into Ollie's room, and then, in his own time and fashion, he arrived at what he wanted to ask.

"Now I want you to tell this jury, Mrs. Greening, if at any time, during that night or thereafter, you discussed or talked of or chatted about the killing of Isom Chase with your husband?" asked Hammer.

"Oh laws, yes," said Mrs. Greening.

The prosecuting attorney was rising slowly to his feet. He seemed concentrated on something; a frown knotted his brow, and he stood with his open hand poised as if to reach out quickly and check the flight of something which he expected to wing in and assail the jury.

Said Hammer, after wiping his glistening forehead with a yellow silk handkerchief:

"Yes. And now, Mrs. Greening, I will ask you if at any time your husband ever told you what was said, if anything, by any party inside of that house when he run up to the kitchen door that night and knocked?"

"I object!" said the prosecutor sharply, flinging out his ready hand.

"Don't answer that question!" warned the judge.

Mrs. Greening had it on her lips; anybody who could read print on a signboard could have told what they were shaped to say. She held them there in their preliminary position of enunciation, pursed and wrinkled, like the tied end of a sausage-link.

"I will frame the question in another manner," said Hammer, again feeling the need of his large handkerchief.

"There is no form that would be admissible, your honor," protested the prosecutor. "It is merely hearsay that the counsel for the defense is attempting to bring out and get before the jury. I object!"

"Your course of questioning, Mr. Hammer, is highly improper, and in flagrant violation to the established rules of evidence," said the judge. "You must confine yourself to proof by this witness of what she, of her own knowledge and experience, is cognizant of. Nothing else is permissible."

"But, your honor, I intend to show by this witness that when Sol Greening knocked on that door——"

"I object! She wasn't present; she has testified that she was at home at that time, and in bed."

This from the prosecutor, in great heat.

"Your honor, I intend to prove—" began Hammer.

"This line of questioning is not permissible, as I told you before," said the judge in stern reproof.

But Hammer was obdurate. He was for arguing it, and the judge ordered the sheriff to conduct the jury from the room. Mrs. Greening, red and uncomfortable, and all at sea over it, continued sitting in the witness-chair while Hammer laid it off according to his view of it, and the prosecutor came back and tore his contentions to pieces.

The judge, for no other purpose, evidently, than to prove to the defendant and public alike that he was unbiased and fair—knowing beforehand what his ruling must be—indulged Hammer until he expended his argument. Then he laid the matter down in few words.

Mrs. Greening had not been present when her husband knocked on the door of Isom Chase's kitchen that night; she did not know, therefore, of her own experience what was spoken. No matter what her husband told her he said, or anybody else said, she could not repeat the words there under oath. It would be hearsay evidence, and such evidence was not admissible in any court of law. No matter how important such testimony might appear to one seeking the truth, the rules of evidence in civilized courts barred it. Mrs. Greening's lips must remain sealed on what Sol said Joe said, or anybody said to someone else.

So the jury was called back, and Mrs. Greening was excused, and Hammer wiped off the sweat and pushed back his cuffs. And the people who had come in from their farmsteads to hear this trial by jury—all innocent of the traditions and precedents of practice of the law—marveled how it could be. Why, nine people out of nine, all over the township where Sol Greening lived, would take his wife's word for anything where she and Sol had different versions of a story.

It looked to them like Sol had told the truth in the first place to his wife, and lied on the witness-stand. And here she was, all ready to show the windy old rascal up, and they wouldn't let her. Well, it beat all two o'clock!

Of course, being simple people who had never been at a university in their lives, they did not know that Form and Precedent are the two pillars of Strength and Beauty, the Jachin and Boaz at the entrance of the temple of the law. Or that the proper genuflections before them are of more importance than the mere bringing out of a bit of truth which might save an accused man's life.

And so it stood before the jury that Sol Greening had knocked on the door of Isom Chase's kitchen that night and had not been bidden to enter, when everybody in the room, save the jury of twelve intelligent men—who had been taken out to keep their innocence untainted and their judgment unbiased by a gleam of the truth—knew that he had sat up there and lied.

Hammer cooled himself off after a few minutes of mopping, and called Ollie Chase to the witness-chair. Ollie seemed nervous and full of dread as she stood for a moment stowing her cloak and handbag in her mother's lap. She turned back for her handkerchief when she had almost reached the little gate in the railing through which she must pass to the witness-chair. Hammer held it open for her and gave her the comfort of his hand under her elbow as she went forward to take her place.

A stir and a whispering, like a quick wind in a cornfield, moved over the room when Ollie's name was called. Then silence ensued. It was more than a mere listening silence; it was impertinent. Everybody looked for a scandal, and most of them hoped that they should not depart that day with their long-growing hunger unsatisfied.

Ollie took the witness-chair with an air of extreme nervousness. As she settled down in her cloud of black skirt, black veil, and shadow of black sailor hat, she cast about the room a look of timid appeal. She seemed to be sounding the depths of the listening crowd's sympathy, and to find it shallow and in shoals.

Hammer was kind, with an unctuous, patronizing gentleness. He seemed to approach her with the feeling that she might say a great deal that would be damaging to the defendant if she had a mind to do it, but with gentle adroitness she could be managed to his advantage. Led by a question here, a helping reminder there, Ollie went over her story, in all particulars the same as she had related at the inquest.

Hammer brought out, with many confidential glances at the jury, the distance between Ollie's room and the kitchen; the fact that she had her door closed, that she had gone to bed heavy with weariness, and was asleep long before midnight; that she had been startled by a sound, a strange and mysterious sound for that quiet house, and had sat up in her bed listening. Sol Greening had called her next, in a little while, even before she could master her fright and confusion and muster courage to run down the hall and call Joe.

Hammer did well with the witness; that was the general opinion, drawing from her a great deal about Joe's habit of life in Isom's house, a great deal about Isom's temper, hard ways, and readiness to give a blow.

She seemed reluctant to discuss Isom's faults, anxious, rather, to ease them over after the manner of one whose judgment has grown less severe with the lapse of time.