SCOTT JACKSON IS BROUGHT TO HIS TRIAL FOR LIFE.
About five minutes before the arrival of Judge Helm in the court-room Sheriff Plummer, having all his arrangements perfected, slipped out and proceeded to the jail, and in a few moments emerged therefrom with Scott Jackson handcuffed to his arm.
With a nervous smile and a forced jauntiness, which accorded illy with his visible perturbation, Scott Jackson stepped from the old jail door in Newport and started through the dense lines of curious men, women and children for the court of justice, wherein his fight for life will be made. He was handcuffed to Sheriff Plummer, and, as a further precaution, was flanked on either side by a stalwart deputy.
Jackson seemed in good humor as he walked from the jail, and did not show the same dread for the Newport crowds that he had displayed on the two former occasions upon which he passed through them. He was taken upstairs in the Courthouse and placed in the witness room to await the opening of court.
Ordinarily, a man facing death excites sympathy, particularly among the class who waited for two hours to get a glimpse of Jackson. But the most casual observer could not fail to see that the populace was singularly unanimous in its intense hostility to the supposed and accused murderers of Pearl Bryan.
A man may be a murderer and a hero in the minds of many. But nothing but deep-seated and virulent hostility was manifested by ninety-nine out of every hundred of those who gathered about the Courthouse in Newport and reviewed the famous crime in infinite detail. "He'll hang, and he ought to, —— him," said one big fellow in the center of a listening group.
"Yes, and Walling out to follow him in five minutes," said a bare-headed working woman, as she shifted a baby from arm to arm. The same sullen antipathy was apparent as Jackson passed through the crowd. It was indisputably general.