THE OLD GROVE CROSSING
By Albert H. Coggins
More mother’s tears, and the fourth prisoner discharged! The judge began to fear permanent softening of the heart and therefore took grim satisfaction when the name Timothy McMenamin, alias “One Eyed Johnny,” was called and there shambled into the dock a chronic old jail-bird whose appearance left no remote possibility of the further painful exercise of discretionary powers.
Silence reigned while his Honour scanned the card. From highway robbery and safe cracking the record of Timothy ran the entire gamut of inspiring action, and by some subtle mental telepathy the crowd knew that he had indeed been a man of parts. But now Timothy was in the sere and yellow and had fallen on evil days. The Judge read aloud from the present indictment, to which Timothy had sullenly pleaded “Guilty.”
“Soliciting alms upon the public thoroughfare and vagrancy.”
Then fraught with deep agrieve, his “Why—Timothy!” caught the levity of the crowded courtroom.
The Judge pursed pondering lips. Then a playful thought was his.
“Are you represented by counsel, Timothy?”
Timothy was not.
“Mr. Wallace!”
If a room may be said to gasp, that courtroom gasped.
William R. K. Wallace!
The rubber rattle of an impromptu assignment, usually thrown the teething tyro, given to the very leader of the bar!
His Honour was indeed facetious.
Wallace, engaged in an undertone confab with a court clerk, looked up, converted the instinctive gesture of impatience into one of good-natured acquiescence, and stepped forward. The crowd’s tribute to supremacy: a hush so distinct as to seem almost audible.
The Judge assumed due solemnity.
“Mr. Wallace, we have here a knight-errant of most distinguished parts. He has sojourned in many public institutions. A most cosmopolitan citizen and of unquestioned social standing; having met some of the best wardens in the country. Some twenty years ago he committed a little indiscretion up in Montour County, dwelling there subsequently for a period of six months. That being your own native heath, Mr. Wallace, would it not be chivalric and neighbourly upon your part to volunteer your professional services!”
The crowd enjoyed the speech and scene. In all his years at the bar no one had ever seen William R. K. Wallace nonplussed. Now his Honour had succeeded in “putting one over” on him. His “Certainly, your Honour,” was but instinctive. Of the purport of a possible plea Wallace had no remote idea. So he turned and indulged in a critically professional survey of his client.
As he took in the sullen figure, unshaven, unkempt, and hard, the forbidding aspect painfully accentuated by the patch over one sightless eye—what came of a sudden to the attorney? Masterful and adroit though he was, did he feel the utter futility of it all? It certainly seemed that Wallace—William R. K. Wallace—trembled through an acute second of actual stage fright, the horrible unnerved instant when the mind gropes and finds no substance of thought. Yes, his Honour had scored.
Then, himself again, he addressed the Court. Quietly, almost conversationally and entirely away from the subject at hand; but this was Wallace, and no one stayed him.
“I was born in Centre County, your Honour, not Montour, but so close to the county line that your Honour’s impression is to all intents and purposes correct. So close, in fact, that right down the driveway, scarcely a hundred yards away, one could step into Montour County by crossing the railroad tracks, for they were the county line at that corner.”
Then for a few seconds he indulged in memory’s visualization of early days. Still in a desultory way he continued:
“We lived there contentedly, your Honour, a good father, a sainted mother, myself a grown boy, and—and a baby sister.... She had come late.... Perhaps that’s one reason we made so much of her. Just turned two she was, and a little bundle of winsomeness.... She gathered to herself all the glinting morning sunlight of the mountain tops.”
People stirred restlessly. This was not like Wallace. True, he sometimes indulged in sentiment before a jury and ofttime moved the sturdy yeomanry to free some red-handed rascal regardless of the facts. But to parade his own early rural days and his little sister—well, it only indicated that he was sore pressed.
But now the discerning could note the least little shade of resonance and purpose. And, too, he half turned from time to time toward the man in the dock.
“Through that valley the magnificent Blue Diamond Express went thundering by, bearing its burden of the prosperous and contented.... But then there were other trains, the long slow freights that wended their way, laden, down the valley. They, too, carried passengers ... on the couplings ... cramped up underneath ... or smuggled into the corner of a box car. These were of the underworld—the discontented and the disinherited. The tramp, the outcast ... perchance the criminal, making his getaway from city to city.”
He glanced keenly, quickly; his client was beginning to emerge from stolid indifference.
“The Old Grove Crossing, as they called it, was not so well guarded twenty years ago as now, your Honour. And one day this little two-year-old took it into her baby head to roam. Perhaps childish fancy paints the wild flowers on a distant hill brighter, perhaps some errant butterfly winged its random way across the tracks—who knows?
“At all events, the wanderlust seized her tiny feet and she had come just so near Montour County that she had but to cross the far track to have completely changed jurisdiction. And there she stood, for a big, slow-moving train of empties occupied that track. Puzzled? Perhaps a little; but still it was a matter of no moment.... Neither, your Honour, was the big, thundering Blue Diamond. Why should it be? There existed in all this world no such thing as either evil or fear.... And so she waited, transfixed only by wonderment as the monster thing bore down on her.... I’m aware, your Honour, that in every well-appointed melodrama the hero always appears at the proper instant.... But in real life sometimes—well, we have tried cases in our courts, the purpose of which was to determine the dollar value of that for which there can be no recompense—a baby life crushed out.”
He paused for an impressive second.
“And this was my baby sister.
“Oh, yes, they saw her ... when less than two hundred feet away. Along that straightaway the Montour Valley Railroad Company, in its corporate wisdom, shot its Blue Diamond seventy miles an hour. The engineer was the best man on the line—and he fainted dead away. That’s what their best man did. He had a baby of his own. Instinct made him throw on the brakes ... as well, a child’s bucket of sand on the tracks! ... Down, down it came, shrieking, crashing, pounding, and swirling from side to side; belching its hell of destruction and rasping its million sparks as the brakes half gripped.... Only one small mercy vouchsafed—by its awful might and momentum—instant death!”
Dramatically Wallace passed his hand over his forehead. The Judge had done the same. So well had he played upon their emotions that he sensed to perfection the proper pause duration....
“No, your Honour,” he said quietly, “she did not die. This little story of real life followed the conventional.... Sometimes God is as good as the dramatist. They told us the meagre details. He didn’t; he had a pressing engagement and slipped away, resuming, I suppose, his ‘reservations’ on his Blue Diamond.... He wasn’t very prepossessing, anyway, from all accounts. Any ten-twenty-thirty dramatist could have given us a more presentable, better manicured hero.”
Wallace sauntered a little.
“This object that tumbled from a box car, sprawled, picked himself up, and then jumped like a cat, was, as a matter of fact, a nobody, an outcast, a crook——”
Casually, it seemed, his hand rested on the bowed shoulder of the broken old man.
“Just a one-eyed yeggman, making his way——”
He got no further. The courtroom was in an uproar and unrestrained applause ran its riotous course. There was none to check it.
His Honour, savagely surreptitious with his handkerchief, finally took command of himself and the situation.
“Mr. Wallace, the Court requires no argument in this case. We will accept the guarantee of future good conduct which you were about to offer, and, if necessary, underwrite it ourselves.... Sentence suspended!”
Then as the Court was adjourned and they crowded about the pair of them, counsel and client, a shouldering, demonstrative throng a dozen deep, the Judge, before retiring stilled them for a brief afterword.
“Mr. Wallace, in the matter of the—ah, of certain refreshments, in which we had rendered a mental ruling incidental to the costs thereof, we would say that ruling is hereby reversed and the—the refreshments—are on—the Court.”