XI.
The morning dawned with a radiant disdain of mists. The wind was buoyant, elated. The yellow sunshine, in its vivid perfection, might realize to the imagination the light that first shone upon the world when God saw that it was good. The air was no insipid fluid, breathed unconsciously. It asserted its fragrance and freshness in every respiration. It stirred the pulses like some rare wine; it seemed, indeed, the subtle distillation of all the fruitage of the year, enriched with the bouquet of the summer, and reminiscent of the delicate languors of the spring. The sky had lifted itself to empyreal heights, luminously blue, with occasional faint fleckings of fleecy vapors. The white summits of the mountains were imposed against it with a distinctness that nullified distance; even down their slopes, beyond the limits of the snowfall, the polychromatic vestiges of autumn were visible, with no crudity of color in these sharp contrasts, but with a soft blending of effect. Within the court-house great blocks of sunshine fell upon the floor through the dirty panes. Several of the sashes were thrown up to admit the air. The rusty stove stood cold and empty. Many a day had passed since the spider-webs that hung from the corners of the ceiling and draped the bare windows of the great room had been disturbed. They might suggest to the contemplative mind analogies to the labyrinthine snares of the law, where the intrusive flies perish miserably, and the spiders batten. On one of the window-panes a blue-bottle climbed the glass, intent on some unimagined achievement; always slipping when near the top, and falling buzzing drearily to the bottom, to recommence his laborious ascent in the sunshine. Sometimes he would fly away, droning in melancholy disgust, presently returning and renewing his futile efforts. He was a fine moral example of perverted powers, and might well be commended to the notice of human malcontents,—by nature fitted to soar, but sighing for feats of pedestrianism. In contrast with the day in its alertness, its intense brilliancy, yesterday was blurred, dim, like some distorted dream hardly worth crediting as a portent. It might need as attestation of its reality the jury which it had brought forth. They were all early in their places, having been sequestered in charge of the sheriff, and having slept as it were under the wing of the law. The privilege accorded by law, in phrase of munificent bestowal,—to be tried by a jury of one’s peers,—seems at times a gigantic practical joke, perpetrated by justice on simple humanity. They were indeed Mink’s peers so far as ignorance, station,—for most of them were mountaineers,—poverty, and prejudice might suffice. Few were so intelligent, but none so lawless. Most of them were serving under protest, indifferent to the dignity of the great engine of justice which they represented. The two or three who showed willingness were suspected, either by the defense or the prosecution, of occult motives. All looked unkempt, stolid, dogged, even surlily stupid, as they sat in two rows, chewing as with one gesture. Gradually, however, they visibly brightened under the bland courtesy of Mr. Kenbigh, the attorney for the State, who took early occasion to say—and he paraphrased the remark more than once in the course of the day—that he had never had the pleasure of trying a case before so intelligent a jury, or one to whom the sacred interests of justice could be so safely entrusted. Harshaw, too, deported himself toward them with a mollifying suavity which, to judge from his ordinary manner, would have seemed impossible. He had a very pretty wit, of a rough and extravagant style, that greatly commended him to them and relieved the irksomeness of their duress. Mink had evidently been tutored in regard to his demeanor toward them. He forbore to scowl at Pete Rood with the fierce dismay his face had worn when he saw his enemy sworn on the preceding night. But his dissembling was limited. He simply would not look at Rood at all. There was an unaffected confidence, almost indifference, upon his handsome face that occasioned much comment. It had already been rumored among the bar, thence percolating through the town at large, that the defense had discovered important testimony at the last moment, but that for some reason Harshaw had desired to apply for a continuance. The prisoner, it was said, had protested, and refused downright, declaring that by nightfall, by to-morrow at farthest, he would be on his way to his home in Hazel Valley. This rumor gave an added interest to the moment when the witnesses were brought in to be sworn and put under the rule. The crowd scanned each with a fruitless conjecture as to which possessed the potent and significant knowledge on which the defense relied. Several of them were women, demure as nuns in their straight skirts and short waists and long, tunnel-like sun-bonnets. The mountain men strode in, and stared about them freely, and were very bold, in contrast to these decorous associates, with their grave, downcast eyes and pale, passionless faces. The book was held toward the witnesses, two or three were instructed to put their hands upon it, and then the clerk, in a voice that might have proceeded from an automaton, so wooden was the tone and elocution, recited the oath with a swiftness that seemed profane. The group stood half in the slanting sunbeams, half in the brown shadow, close about the clerk’s desk. Among the tall, muscular figures of the mountain men and the pallid, attenuated elder women was Alethea, looking like some fine illusion of the dusky shadow and gilded sunshine, with her golden hair and her brown homespun dress. How shining golden her hair, how exquisitely fresh and pure her face, how deep and luminous and serious her brown eyes, showed as never before. Somehow she was embellished by the incongruity of the sordid surroundings of the court-room, the great, haggard, unkempt place, and the crude ugliness of its frequenters. Her face was fully revealed, for she had pushed back her bonnet that she might kiss the book. As she took it from the clerk’s hand and pressed her lips to it, Mink’s heart stirred with a thrill it had never before known. He was entering as a discoverer upon a new realm of feeling. He experienced a subtle astonishment at the turbulence, the fierceness, of his own emotion.
The judge was looking at her!
Gwinnan’s hand still held his pen. His head was still bent over the paper on which he wrote. The casual side-glance of those discerning gray eyes was prolonged into a steady gaze of surprise. He did not finish the word he was writing. He laid the pen down presently. He watched her openly, unconsciously, as she gave back the book, and as she walked with the other witnesses into the adjoining room to await the calling of her name.
Mink could hardly analyze this strange emotional capacity, this new endowment, that had come to him, so amazed was he by its unwonted presence. He had not known that he could feel jealousy. He could not identify it when it fell upon him. He had been so supreme in Alethea’s heart, so arrogantly sure of its possession, that he had not cared for Ben Doaks’s hopeless worship from afar; it did not even add to her consequence in his eyes. But that this stranger of high degree—he would not have phrased it thus, for he had been reared in ignorance of the distinction of caste, yet he instinctively recognized it in the judge’s power, his isolated official prominence, his utter removal from all the conditions of the mountaineer’s world—that this man should look at her with that long, wondering gaze, should lay down his pen, forgetting the word he was to write!
Mink felt a terrible pang of isolation. For the first time Alethea was in his mind as an independent identity, subject to influences he could scarcely gauge, perhaps harboring thoughts in which he had no share. Her love for him had hitherto served for him as an expression of her whole nature. He had never recognized other possibilities. Even her continual pleas that he should take heed of the error of his ways he had esteemed as evidence of her absorption in him, her eager, earnest aspiration for his best good; she would endure his displeasure rather than forego aught that might inure to his welfare. He had felt no gratitude that she had come to rescue him, as she had often done, never so sorely needed as now; it had seemed to him natural that she should bestir herself, since she loved him so. The first doubt of the permanence and pervasiveness of this paramount affection stirred within him. He wondered if she had noticed the man’s look, if she were flattered by it. He sought to reassure himself. “Lethe jes’ bogues along, though, seein’ nuthin’, studyin’ ’bout suthin’ else; mebbe she never noticed. But ef Mis’ Purvine hed been hyar, or Mis’ Sayles, I be bound, they’d hev seen it, an’ tole her, too, else they ain’t the wimmen I take ’em fur.” He marveled whether Gwinnan had thought she was pretty. He himself had always accounted her a fairly “good-lookin’ gal,” but no better favored than Elvira Crosby.
He had had no fear of the result of the case since he had known of Alethea’s strange glimpse of Tad; he was, too, in a moral sense, infinitely relieved by the circumstance. Otherwise he might not have been able to entertain a train of thought so irrelevant to the testimony which was being given by the witnesses for the State. He heard it only casually, although he now and then languidly joined the general smile that rewarded some happy hit of Harshaw’s. These pleasantries were chiefly elicited in cross-examining the witnesses for the State, and in wrangles with the attorney-general as to the admissibility of evidence. Kenbigh, with a determination of purple wrath to his bald head, would in his stentorian roar call aloud upon his authorities with a reverent faith as if they were calendared saints. More than once the court ruled against him, when it seemed appropriate in his next remark to drop his voice to a rumbling basso profundo. He maintained due respect for the judge and showed a positive affection for the jury, but the very sight of Harshaw would excite him to an almost bovine expression of rage,—the florid counsel being like a red rag to a bull. At first the only point which Harshaw seemed desirous to make was that none of the witnesses had attached any importance to Mink’s threats, the afternoon of the shooting match, to “bust down the mill,” until they heard of the disaster. He tried, too, to induce them to admit that Mink was a good fellow in the main. The tragic results, however, of his late mischief had given a new and serious interpretation to all his previous pranks, and the witnesses were more likely to furnish supplemental instances of freakish malice and the mischievous ingenuity of his intentional reprisals than to palliate his jocose capers. One old man, a by-stander at the shooting match, was especially emphatic, even venomous. Harshaw involved him in a sketch of what he considered a young man should be. When asked where he had ever known such a man he naively confessed,—himself, “whenst I war young.”
Harshaw found it much safer to take the aggressive. He played upon the alternating fears which Mink’s comrades entertained of the revenuers and the moonshiners. He seemed to question rather pro forma than with the expectation of eliciting serious results, and to amuse himself with the involutions and contradictions in which he contrived to enmesh them, in replying to his questions as to their sobriety that night in the woods, what they had to drink, how much it required to make them drunk.
To the witness it was not a reassuring playfulness. Harshaw looked very formidable as he sat, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, both hands clasping the lapels of his coat. Whenever he made a point he smacked his confident red lips.
“You were perfectly sober that night?”
The witness virtuously assented.
“And why shouldn’t you be,” said the crafty Harshaw, “when we all know there is no still but the God-fearing bonded still in the whole country! Look at the jury, and tell them that you were not drinking that night.”
The unfortunate witness faltered that he had been drinking some.
“You had!” exclaimed Harshaw, with the accents of surprise. “And yet you say, on oath, that you were sober. Now what do you call sober? We must inquire into this. What do you take? I wish I could put that question as it should be between gentlemen, but”—he waved his fat hand—“some other day.”
The witness stared dumbly at him, and the crowd grinned.
“Let me put the question in another form. How much of the reverend stuff is enough to settle you? A pint?”
The witness gallantly declared that he could stand a pint.
“A jugful?”
“Oh, naw, sir,”—meaning a jugful would not be necessary.
In the staccato of affected amaze, “Barrelful!”
The badgered witness protested and explained, and Harshaw asked, lowering his voice, as if it were exceedingly important, “Now, did that whiskey taste like brush whiskey?”
As the quaking, shock-headed country lout replied, the facetious counsel recoiled.
“What! you tell this honorable court, and this intelligent jury, and this upright and learned and teetotaling attorney for the State, that you don’t know the difference in the taste between the illicit corn juice of the mountains and the highly honorable, pure, rectified liquor, taxed and stamped, made and drunk, under the auspices of this great, good, and glorious government!”
The judge, who had watched Harshaw with a dilated, gleaming gray eye and a quivering nostril, spoke abruptly.
“The court will not longer tolerate this buffoonery,” he drawled. “Counsel may cross-examine witness, and if he has nothing to say he may be silent.”
Harshaw flushed deeply. He had always enjoyed certain privileges as a wit. Judge Averill, who loved a joke for its own gladsome sake, had often permitted him to transcend decorum. He had no idea, however, of figuring as the butt of his own ridicule. He was a quick fellow, and took what advantage was possible of the situation. “If it please your Honor,” he said, rising to address the judge, and with an air of great courtesy, “I will waive the right of cross-examination, since my methods fail in satisfying the court.”
Gwinnan looked at him with thinly veiled antagonism. Harshaw relapsed into his tilted chair, still lightly holding his lapels, that favorite posture of rural gentlemen, listening with an air of polite but incidental attention to the attorney-general’s examination of the next witness, and declining with a wave of his fat hand to cross-examine.
A stir of excitement pervaded the bar; great interest was aroused in the audience. An old farmer, sitting on one of the benches, holding one treasured knee in both hands, put his foot on the floor to take care of itself, and leaned forward in breathless eagerness to lose no word. Others, who had been less attentive, were nudging one another, and asking what had been said. Again and again, as the successive witnesses were turned over to the defense for cross-examination, and the lawyer waved his pudgy hand, there was a suppressed sensation. His freak of silence had the effect of greatly expediting matters, and the attorney-general announced before the adjournment for dinner that he had no more witnesses to call.
In conducting the examination of the defendant’s witnesses Harshaw was extremely grave. He had an excited gleam in his eye, a flurried, precipitate manner, as he went on. Now and then he nodded his head, and tossed back his mane of yellow hair as if it were heavy and harassed him. He still sat in the big, important posture he liked to assume, but every glance was full of an acute anxiety.
Mink strove again to fix his mind on the testimony. Over and over it wandered. He only knew vaguely that his best friends were assuring the jury that his escapades were all in mirth and naught in malice, and instancing as indications of his deeper nature all the good turns he had ever done. He was a loose-handed fellow. He had no thrifty instincts, and perhaps because he valued lightly he gave freely. But the habit, such as it might be, was displayed to the jury under the guise of generosity.
The sunlight now slanting upon the walls had turned to a deep golden-red hue, for the early sunset was close at hand. Through a western window one might see the great vermilion sphere, begirt with a horizontal band of gray cloud, and sinking down into the dun-colored uncertainties about the horizon. The yellow hickory-tree beside the window showed through its thinning leaves the graceful symmetry of its black boughs. The room was dropping into a mellow duskiness, hardly obscurity, for as yet the soft light was sufficient to make all objects distinct in the midst of the gathering shadow,—the lawyers, the prisoner, the tousled heads of the audience, the attentive jury, the unwearied judge. Harshaw could even read his own handwriting as he looked at the list he held, and said, “Mr. Sheriff, call Alethea Sayles.”
“Alethea Sayles,” roared Mr. Sheriff at the door, as if Alethea Sayles were “beyond the seas” and hard of hearing besides, instead of waiting expectantly in the adjoining room, ten steps away.
As she came in, Mink was quick to notice the interest on Gwinnan’s face,—a sort of grave curiosity without any element of disrespect. She had a look in her eyes which Mink had often seen before, and which at once rebuked and angered him,—an expression of spiritual earnestness, of luminous purity; he had sneered at it as “trying to look pious.” She sat down in the witness-chair, and pushed back from her forehead her long bonnet; under its brown rim her golden hair showed in lustrous waves. Her saffron kerchief was knotted beneath her round chin. Her face was slightly flushed with the excitement of the moment, but she was not flurried, nor embarrassed, nor restless, nor uncouth, as many of her predecessors had been. Her deliberate, serious manner gave her an air of great value, and as she began to reply to the questions, her clear-voiced, soft drawl pervaded the court-room, singularly silent now, and there was a growing impression that hers was the important testimony for which all had been waiting. Harshaw’s manner served to confirm this. He was repressed, grave; only the quick, nervous glance of his opaque blue eye indicated his excitement; his questions were framed with the greatest care, and some of these were strange enough to excite comment. He asked her first to tell all that she knew about the party in the woods that night,—whether they were drinking and had access to any ample supply of liquor. She recited her adventure at Boke’s barn, and detailed the subsequent interview with the moonshiner and her refusal to keep his secret, throughout scarcely suppressed excitement in the court-room, for every man knew that with the words she courted martyrdom and took her life in her hands. Harshaw seemed to prize this attestation of her courage and her high sense of the sacred obligations of her oath, and dexterously contrived it so that the judge and the jury should be fully impressed with the crystalline purity of her moral sense, with her immovable determination to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He persevered in the examination of this point with great pertinacity, despite many stormy wrangles with the attorney for the State as to the pertinence and admissibility of the evidence, and the occasional ruling of the judge against him. Enough was secured, however, to prove that despite the limitations of the bonded still, Mink had had the opportunity to get drunk if he chose, and his habits were not those of a teetotaler.
The lawyer’s questions then became more inexplicable.
“When you discovered that you could give some testimony in this case, what did you do?”
Alethea pushed back her bonnet still further, and stared at him.
“Why, you-uns know,” she said.
“Tell the jury.”
Like many rural witnesses, she persisted in addressing the judge. She would fix her serious brown eyes on the stolid wooden faces in the jury-box, then lift them to the judge and answer.
“I kem down ter the jail ter see Reuben, an’ tell him.”
“And did you see him?”
She looked at Harshaw, with a deep humiliation and resentment intensifying the flush on her delicate cheek to a burning crimson. His gravity, the respect of his manner, reassured her. She replied with her deliberate dignity,——
“You-uns know mighty well he wouldn’t see me.”
“Then what did you do?”
She seemed for a moment doubtful if she would answer.
“I dunno how ye hev forgot,” she said slowly. “I hain’t.”
“I want you to tell the jury,” he explained.
“I tried to make you listen.”
“And what did I do?”
Once more she pushed her brown bonnet further from her golden head, and looked at him silently.
The pause was so long that the attorney-general remarked that really he could not see the pertinence of the examination.
The judge spoke presently: “Counsel would do well not to harass the witness with unnecessary questions.”
What new life was in the man’s tones! He had forgotten to drawl. There had been many a badgered witness on the stand to-day whom he had not interfered to protect. Mink eyed him narrowly through the closing dusk. He was leaning forward upon the desk. He was listening with no impartial judicial interest. A personal concern was expressed in his face.
The sympathetic cadence in his voice struck on other ears than Mink’s. It was like an open sesame to Alethea’s heart. The pent-up indignation burst forth. She was all at once eager to tell the affronts she could not resent. “He wouldn’t listen ter me, jedge!” she cried. “He ran from me,—actially ran down the street. An’ I didn’t know what ter do. An’ nobody knowed ’bout ’n it but me. An’ I dassent tell nobody ’ceptin’ the lawyer. An’ Jerry Price,—him ez air on the jury,—he ’lowed ef I knowed suthin’ I wanted ter tell in court, he’d make the lawyer listen, an’ so he did. An’ I tole him.”
“When was that?” asked Harshaw.
“Yestiddy mornin’.”
“So that was the reason you didn’t tell it before?”
“I war feared ter tell ennybody but the lawyer, ’kase Reuben’s enemies mought fix it somehows so ’twouldn’t be no ’count.”
“Well, what was this you wanted to tell?”
Her face was growing dim among the glooms. The dusky figures within the bar, the shadowy judge, the indistinct mass of the crowd, the great windows,—indefinite gray squares,—seemed for a moment the darker because of a dull suffusion of yellow light in the halls, falling through the doorways, and heralding the coming of the lamps.
“I wanted to tell that I seen Tad Simpkins arter they ’lowed he war drownded.”
There was absolute silence for a moment; then, wild commotion. Men were talking loudly to each other in the crowd. The lights came in with a flare. Several of the jury requested to have the answer repeated. The attorney-general began to ask a question, left off, and bent his head to his notes. A sudden shrill, quaking voice pierced the tumult.
“I know it air a true word!” cried the old miller, clasping his hands. “God would not deliver my soul ter hell. I fund him in my youth, but my age air the age o’ the backslider. He would not desert me, though! An’ I hev been gin ter do my good works o’ faith anew. I’ll find my boy. I’ll make amends. I’ll”——
The sheriff’s insistence, “Silence in court!” had no coercion for him. He began to sob and cry aloud, and to call the idiot’s name, and was finally taken by the deputy and led out of the court-room, the officer promising to come and let him know as soon as Alethea had disclosed the boy’s whereabouts.
Mink glanced around him in triumph. His lip curved. A brilliant elation shone in his eyes. He tossed back, with an arrogant gesture, his long, red, curling hair, gilded by the lamplight to a brighter hue. He joyed to see the discomfiture of his detractors, who had given their testimony with all the gusto that appertains to stamping on a man, literally and metaphorically, who is already down. He noted, too, the surprise and pleasure in Ben Doaks’s eye, in Jerry Price’s freckled, ugly face, and, strangely enough, Peter Rood looked transfigured. His surly scowl was gone, as if it had never existed. His swarthy face was irradiated by his great excited eyes. A flush dyed his cheek. His breath came in quick gasps. He seemed inordinately relieved, delighted. What! because the forlorn little idiot was not dead? Mink could not understand it. With not even a surmise to explain the demonstration, he stared in suddenly renewed gravity at his old enemy on the jury.
As soon as order was restored, Harshaw resumed his questions.
“Tell the jury when and where you saw him, and how you are sure it was after he was reputed to be drowned.”
“’Kase ’twar on the Monday o’ the camp-meetin’ in Eskaqua Cove, an’ that warn’t begun till arter the mill war busted down,” said Alethea.
She detailed the scene at the little school-house in her uncouth phrasings, every syllable carrying conviction to her hearers. Her bonnet had fallen quite back on her shoulders. Her face was delicately ethereal in the lamplight,—so much of the sincerities of her nature it expressed, so fine and true an intelligence, that, beautiful as it was, it was still more spiritual. The strange story she had told was improbable. Looking upon her face it was impossible to doubt it.
“That night, what did you do?”
“I let Buck an’ the rest o’ the fambly go by ter aunt Dely’s house, an’ whenst they war out o’ sight I called Tad, but he wouldn’t answer. An’ then I climbed over the fence, an’ sarched an’ sarched fur him. But I couldn’t find him,—not in the house, nor under it, nare one. Then I went on ter aunt Dely’s,—Mis’ Purvine’s,” she added, decorously, remembering that her relative was a stickler for etiquette, and might not relish the familiar appellation of kinship in a public assembly. “I never tole nobody, ’kase I war feared ez whoever hed Tad a-hidin’ of him fur spite agin Reuben would hear ’bout’n it, an’ take him so fur away ez we-uns couldn’t never ketch him agin. I went back ter the school-house over an’ over, a-sarchin’ fur him, hopin’ he’d take a notion ter kem thar agin. An’ at last I ’lowed I’d tell the lawyer.”
It had become very plain to the listeners that it was in the interests of his client that Harshaw had permitted his own rude conduct to be made public. The prosecution could not now reasonably demand why a hue and cry had not been raised, and why the boy was not brought into court, as it was very evident that because of the witness’s mistaken secrecy and the lawyer’s purblind folly the facts had not become known to the defense until the preceding day, when it was futile to search a place where the fugitive had been glimpsed three months before.
The attorney-general, about to cross-examine the witness, cleared his throat several times on a low key. He began with a deliberation and caution which indicated that he considered her formidable to the interests of the State. He sat with his side to the table,—the rural lawyer seldom rises save to address the court,—with one elbow upon it, and the other hand twirling his heavy gold watch-chain that festooned his ample stomach. More than once he desisted in this operation, and passed his hand soothingly over his bald head, as if he were encouraging his ideas. He at once sought to show an interested motive in the testimony.
Was she a relation of the prisoner? Was she not interested in him? Was he not her lover? Ah, he had been! And he was not now? And why?
Alethea’s simple and modest decorum in answering these questions abashed the ridicule that the mere mention of the tender passion always excites in a rural crowd. She only threw added light upon her character when she replied:
“Reuben didn’t like folks ter argufy with him. I useter beg him not ter play kyerds, an’ be so powerful gamesome, an’ drink whiskey, an’ git in sech a many scrapes. An’ he ’lowed ’twarn’t my business. An’ I reckon ’twarn’t But it never ’peared-like ter me ez sech goin’s-on war right, an’ I couldn’t holp sayin’ so. An’ so he ’lowed ez me an’ him couldn’t agree, an’ thar war no use a-tryin’.”
Mink glanced up at Gwinnan to note the impression of this plain statement. The judge was looking at him.
The attorney-general went on, hoping to find a discrepancy in her testimony, yet hardly knowing how he had best approach it. The court-room had relapsed into absolute silence. One could hear in the pauses the slight movement of the branches of the trees without as the light wind stirred. They were distinctly visible beside the windows, for the night was fair. All the long upper sashes gave upon a sky of a fine, pure azure, seeming more delicate for the dull yellow lamplight flooding the room. The moon with an escort of clouds was riding splendidly up toward the meridian; now and then they closed jealously about her, and again through their parting ranks she looked out radiantly and royally on her realms below. The frost touched the panes here and there with a crystalline sparkle. The attorney-general fixed his eyes upon the moon as he pondered; then, his fingers drumming lightly upon the table, he asked, “It was at the little school-house on the road to Bethel camp-ground?”
“Yes, sir,” said Alethea.
“Were you ever there before?”
“A many a time,” said Alethea. “The folkses in Eskaqua Cove goes thar ter preachin’.”
He glanced again absently at the moon, his fingers still drumming on the table.
“It’s a church-house, then,” he said, adopting the vernacular, “as well as a school-house?”
“Yes, sir,” assented the witness.
“Well, is this fence by which you were standing the fence around the play-yard?”
“Naw, sir,” said Alethea, amazed at the idea of this civilized provision for youthful sports. “The palin’s air round three sides o’ the house, leavin’ out the side whar the door be, ter pertect the graves.”
The drumming fingers of the attorney-general were suddenly still. “It is a graveyard, then?” he said, in a sepulchral undertone, overmastered himself by the surprise.
“Yes, sir. Folks air buried thar. It’s a graveyard.”
There was a pause.
“There’s no place more appropriate for a boy in poor Tad’s predicament to be!” cried the lawyer. “Look here,” squaring himself before the table and placing his elbows upon it, “do you believe in ghosts?”
Harshaw had changed color; he had been fiercely biting his red lips and stroking his yellow beard throughout these interrogatories, seeing their drift more clearly, perhaps, than the prosecuting officer did. Now he sprang to his feet, and insisted that the attorney for the State should not be permitted to play upon the superstition of the witness. She had seen no ghost. The court would not, he hoped, permit the questions to take the form of an attempt to persuade a witness—of great native intelligence, indeed, and of the highest moral worth, but densely ignorant, and doubtless saturated with the ridiculous superstitions of the uneducated—that in seeing this fugitive lad she had beheld a supernatural manifestation. “In one moment, sir,” he interpolated, addressing Peter Rood, who sat in the back row of the jury, and who had suddenly bent forward, pointing a long finger at the witness, as if he were about to ask a question. “The boy doubtless swam out of the river, and being a maltreated little drudge ran away, and is now somewhere held in hiding by persons inimical to the prisoner. The witness had a glimpse of him. There is no man here ignorant enough to believe that she saw a ghost,—least of all the learned and astute counsel for the State.”
“I don’t believe she saw a ghost,” said the attorney-general, still seated, cocking up his eyes at his vehement opponent. “I do believe, however, most firmly, that the witness had an illusion, hallucination.”
There was a stir in the audience and the jury as he uttered these big words. They seemed to represent something more vaguely formidable than a ghost.
“Counsel must conduct the examination on a reasonable basis,” remarked the judge.
“I will do so, your Honor,” in the basso profundo of deep respect.
Mink, agitated, trembling with the sudden shock, leaned forward and looked with burning eyes at Alethea. How was she discrediting the testimony she had given for him? How was she jeopardizing his fate?
She was almost overcome for a moment. Her nerves were shaken; she was appalled by the sudden revolution her simple disclosure had wrought. Her lips trembled, her eyes filled, but she made a gallant struggle for self-control, and answered in a steady voice the attorney-general’s next question.
“Did the boy wear a hat, or was he bare-headed?”
There was suppressed excitement in the audience, for Tad’s hat and coat, recovered from the river, had been shown to the jury while she was in the ante-room with the other witnesses.
“I didn’t notice,—’twar so suddint”
“How was he dressed?”
“I didn’t see,” faltered Alethea.
“What did you see?”
“I seen his face, ez clear ez I see yourn this minit.”
“How did he look,—hearty?”
“Naw, sir; he looked mighty peaked. His face war bleached,”—a thrill ran through the crowd,—“an’ I reckon he war skeered ez he seen me, fur he ’peared plumb tarrified.”
“How long did you see his face?”
“A minit, mebbe; the fog passed ’twixt us.”
“Ah, there was fog!”
The attorney-general cast a triumphant sidelong glance at the jury.
He paused abruptly, and turned toward them.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, addressing Peter Rood. “I had quite forgotten you wanted to ask a question.”
It did not immediately strike him as odd that the man was still in the same position,—in the shadow, leaning forward, supported on the back of the chair of the juryman in front of him, and still pointing at the witness with a long finger.
The judge took note of the lapse of time. “Mr. Sheriff,” he said, irritably, “wake that juror up. The man’s asleep.”
There was a stir in the jury-box among the attentive eleven men. The juror on whose chair the immovable figure leaned turned his head, and met the fixed gaze of the eyes so close to his own.
He sprang up with a loud cry.
“The man is dead!” he shrieked.