CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
The jury had retired for consultation prior to bringing in a verdict of “Guilty,” which was expected of them. Retiring at all seemed little more than a farce, for from the beginning to the end of the case the evidence had gone so steadily against the defendant that by the time the last witness had been called there was no manner of doubt in the public mind that Robert Sullivan had deliberately and in cold blood murdered Jack Wilder, and it needed not the vigorous speech of the prosecuting attorney to convince any one to that effect.
The evidence, being briefly summed up, ran as follows: Robert, or, as he was more familiarly called, Bob Sullivan, while in a state of intoxication, quarreled with and lost his last cent to Jack Wilder, a professional sharper. Awaking the morning after his debauch, to find himself beggared, he had sworn, in the presence of several witnesses, to get his money back or kill the man who had outwitted him. Accordingly, he had set out to meet Wilder on his return from a neighboring town, and next day the body of the latter was found in a lonely stretch of the road, with a knife sticking in his heart.
Sullivan had been obliged to admit that he had met his enemy near this spot, and that they had a stormy interview, but maintained that they parted without blows, as Wilder promised him to restore his money. There was no tittle of circumstantial evidence wanting to confirm the appearance of Sullivan’s guilt, and even the attorney for the defense was privately convinced of the falsity and absurdity of his client’s plea of “Not guilty.”
The judge, a large, pompous man, having instructed the jury in his most severe and autocratic manner, busied himself with some papers, and did not deign a glance to the assemblage below. It was, as could readily be observed, a gathering of small tradespeople and farmers. Here and there the keen face of a lawyer or that of a stranger from the neighboring city stood out boldly from the sea of honest vacuity which surrounded it.
The prisoner sat with his face buried in his hands, which had lost their former tan, and were pale and trembling. Near him was his wife, hugging a sickly babe to her breast, and showing in her wild eyes, twitching mouth, and every line of her meager, stooping figure, the terror which held her in its grasp. A breathless silence was upon that audience in the shabby courtroom; even the baby had ceased its fretful wailing, and the buzz of a bluebottle fly entangled in a spider’s web in the window was the only sound that broke the stillness.
Five minutes passed, ten, twenty, and still the jury had not come. A murmur of impatience began to be heard, and presently the judge beckoned the sheriff to him, whispered a few words in his ear, and saw him depart through the same door which apparently swallowed up the jurors. The sheriff made his way through several gloomy passages into a large, light room, where he inquired of the foreman if they were not yet agreed.
“No, we ain’t!” gruffly responded that functionary. “There’s eleven of us for hangin’, but Conway, there, won’t hear to it. He wants to clear the feller out an’ out, an’ says he’ll stay with us till kingdom come before he’ll budge an inch.”
Giles Conway, the man whose obstinacy was causing such unnecessary delay, was seated rather apart from the rest, and wore the brown jeans and soft hat which marked him a farmer. Even had not the absence of any attempt at foppishness proclaimed his caste, there was something about him which insensibly connected itself in the observer’s mind with the free winds and untrammeled sunshine of the country. He was much the same color from his head to his feet, for eyes, skin, hair, and beard were alike brown, and only the deep lines on his firm, squarely cut face showed that he was no longer young. Just at present he seemed in no wise disconcerted by the wrathful impatience of his associates, but pushing his felt hat farther back on his head, and settling himself more comfortably in his wooden chair, said slowly:
“No, friends, you won’t ever get me to hand over a man to the gallows on such evidence as that, an’ there ain’t no special use of cussin’ about it, for it won’t do a bit of good.”
“Oh, but that is such foolishness!” broke in one of the group. “Here’s all this evidence, that no man in his senses could doubt, a-goin’ to prove that Bob Sullivan killed Jack Wilder, and here you sit like a bump on a log, and won’t listen to none of it.”
“That’s just it,” replied Conway. “You all think that evidence like that orter hang a man, but if you’d seen as much of that sort of thing as I have, you’d think different. I ain’t much of a talker, but maybe you wouldn’t mind listenin’ to a case of this kind I happen to know about, an’ maybe the time I’m done—an’ it won’t take me long to tell it—you’ll see why I don’t want to hang a young fellow I’ve known nearly all my life for somethin’ that very likely he didn’t do.
“You all know how when I wasn’t much over twenty I went West an’ put all the money I could rake an’ scrape into a ranch an’ cattle. Well, the place next to mine was owned by a young fellow—we’ll call him Jim Saunders, although that isn’t his name—who’d come out, like me, to make his fortune. We took to each other from the first, an’ pretty soon we were more like brothers than a good many of the real article I’ve seen since. After a while Jim told me he was goin’ to get married, an’ a few weeks later he brought home the prettiest little thing you’d see in a day’s ride. She had lots of yellow hair that was always tumblin’ down over her shoulders, an’ big blue eyes, an’ a voice like a wild bird, an’ Jim—well, he thought there wasn’t nobody like Milly in all the country.
“She seemed fond of him, too, at first, but it wasn’t long before I could see that it was a clear case of misfit all round. There was lots of excuse for her, for of course it was a hard life, an’ she loved finery an’ pretty things, an’ Jim didn’t have the money to give ’em to her, though he worked early an’ late, an’ did his level best to make somethin’ more than a livin’.
“Maybe it would have turned out all right in time if it hadn’t been that one day Jim went to the nearest town to buy some farmin’ implements, an’ fell in there with a fellow he used to know back East, and nothin’ would do him but he must go home with Jim to see how he was fixed. Well, he come, an’ it was a black day for Jim when he set foot on his threshold, for from the minute he saw Milly he hadn’t eyes for nothin’ else, and she bein’ a woman, was mightily set up to think a city man would set such store by her.
“He made himself so pleasant an’ so much at home that they begged him to stay all night, an’ long about twelve o’clock he was, or pretended to be, took awful sick. They worked with him till he got better, and wouldn’t hear of his tryin’ to go away next mornin’; so he stayed on, setting on the big rockin’-chair with a pillow behind him an’ talkin’ to Milly while Jim was off at work. He didn’t seem in no particular hurry about goin’, but Jim never ’spicioned for a minute that anything was wrong, for he liked the fellow first-rate, an’ would no more have thought of doubtin’ Milly than he would the Lord that made him.
“One evenin’ he came in late, tired an’ hungry, an’ foun’ that his wife—his wife that he loved—had left him and gone away with that devil that he thought was his friend! He went wild for a while. It seemed to him like everything was black around him, an’ there was great splotches of blood before his eyes, an’ he could hear voices that kept a-laughin’ at him an’ callin’ him a fool, an’ the only thing he held fast to was that he must follow ’em to the world’s end and kill the man that had took away all he had. So he tracked ’em, now here, now there, but always they doubled on him, till at las’, when his money was gone, he lost ’em altogether.
“Then he came to himself a little, an’ sold his ranch an’ went back to his old home to wait—for he knowed somehow that one day, sooner or later, the Lord would give him his revenge. He worked while he waited, an’ made money an’ got well off, an’ nobody knew nothin’ ’bout his ever bein’ married, so he had somethin’ like peace. But he never forgot, an’, after a while, it seemed like he didn’t feel so hard toward Milly, for he remembered how young she was, an’ how foolish, an’ what a devil she had to deal with; an’ sometimes he could see her with the pretty color all gone from her cheeks, an’ the laugh from her voice, heartbroken an’ deserted.
“At last, twenty years afterward, when he was gettin’ on in life, his time came. He was ridin’ along, not thinkin’ about anything in particular, when he happened to look up, an’ there, comin’ toward him roun’ a bend in the road, an’ ridin’ on a big black horse, was the man he’d waited for all these years. They knowed each other the minute their eyes met, an’ the fellow got white as chalk an’ pulled his horse clean back on his haunches, tryin’ to turn roun’ an’ make a run for it, but it wasn’t no good, for Jim was off his horse in a minute an’ had him by the throat, an’ in less time than it takes to tell it, he had pulled him down, cursin’ an’ cuttin’ at him, to the ground. Then, holdin’ him there, with his knee on his breast an’ his knife at his throat, he says:
“‘Where’s Milly? Tell me, or I’ll cut your devilish heart out!’
“The fellow glared back at him like a rat in a trap, an’ seein’ death in his eyes, an’ knowing ’twas no use to lie, says:
“‘She’s dead; she got sick when we got to New York, an’ I left her, an’ she died in a week.’
“‘I’d orter kill you like a snake, but I’ve always lived square, an’ the Lord helpin’ me, I’ll die that way, so I’ll give you an even chance. Get out your knife an’ fight, an’ remember that one of us has got to die right here.’
“Then he let him up, and they went at it. They was pretty evenly matched to look at ’em, but Jim thought of Milly dyin’ all alone, an’ fought like a tiger, an’ pretty soon he left the man that had come between ’em stiff an’ stark with a knife in his heart, an’ his white face a-glarin’ up at the sky.
“Then comes in the part of the story that I want you all to take for a warnin’, before you’ll be so quick to find any man guilty on nothin’ but circumstantial evidence. When the body was found, nobody ever thought of ’spicionin’ Jim, but everything pointed to another man as the one who had done the killin’. He’d sworn to kill the dead man; he was on the hunt for him when last seen, an’ he couldn’t prove no alibi. So they arrested him, and the first Jim heard of it he was summonsed on the jury that was to try him. Jim hadn’t never thought of giving himself up for a murder, for he knowed he’d fought and killed his enemy fair an’ square, an’ he was glad he done it. He didn’t see that it was any business of the law’s to interfere between ’em, and he didn’t like to drag in Milly’s name before the judge an’ jury an’ all the people who wouldn’t remember, like he did, when he was young an’ innocent. Even when he was summonsed, he didn’t have any notion but he would be cleared when they’d look into things some, an’ he made up his mind not to say nothin’ if he could help it.
“But when he got there, everything went so dead against the prisoner that if he hadn’t knowed he’d done the killin’ himself, he’d ’a’ thought sure he was guilty. He got kind of dazed at last, and didn’t seem to know nothin’ till he found himself in a room with the rest of the jury, an’ all eleven of ’em wanting to hang the man that he knowed was innocent. Then he came to his senses and voted against ’em, an’ when they asked him for his reasons, he told ’em the story I’ve been tellin’ you.”
Giles Conway stopped and gazed stolidly into the eyes of his audience, who had gathered around him till they hemmed him in on every side.
“An’ what did they do with him?” asked the foreman at last.
“I don’t know,” he answered slowly. “It ain’t decided yet, for Jack Wilder was the man that run off with Milly, an’ it was me that killed him.”