THE SILENT WITNESS
By Herbert D. Ward
There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of anxiety.
There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?
Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship, Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of boulders in the mountains.
It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot.
"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his mother.
"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she answered with quaint devoutness.
But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company," and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two, and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great tears blinded his sight.
We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a living—and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head. But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's blessing, an apprehension for the future—bitter, breathless, began to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain, had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a meaning.
But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread into the house.
"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces before him.
"Lord a-mercy!"
"Ikey! Air you teched?"
"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss—he went—see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he—"
"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.
"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an' live with you, mother—won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother you've got now. Your folks can spare you."
Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."
She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.
Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life, the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity himself.
But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.
"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height, displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head, and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks. From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day—for how could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about the heifer?—Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.
August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months. Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naïvely considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.
At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:
"In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father.— 2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."
"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it, neither."
Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and to board him in the cheapest way for several days.
"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height, "no one can!"
It is just such country lads as this—strong, self-reliant, religious—who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other, by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.
Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of unuttered misery.
But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.
"MOVE ON, WILL YER!"
"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance, and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.
"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"
She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped that they might clasp about his neck.
"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong. Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an honest man, an' a pious woman, and"—dropping with great solemnity into scriptural language—"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your godly name."
With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their sons into the whirlwind of the world.
Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her, and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.
"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man, moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.
Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.
They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken, helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the parlor window. If he had known—a doubt crossed his brain, but the girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting, breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they hid behind an oak tree and clasped.
It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters. He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull" or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be swerved.
To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience—and how else should he? This was his syllogism:
A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.
This man before me is a policeman.
Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to him for advice.
The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise—and laughed at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a "billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.
It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the guardian of the peace confidently.
This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity. The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet were in his air.
"Excuse me, sir—I want to ask you—" began Isaac, after a proper obeisance.
"Move on, will yer!"
"But I wanted to ask you—"
"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"
"I want you to help me!"
"The —— you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye to the lock-up—so help me—!"
Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had received half annihilated his intelligence.
"AM—I—IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR? IS THIS YOUR LAW?"
Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him. It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror—not of cowardice, but of friendlessness—seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on. He had passed through the main street—or across it—he did not know—until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms had been exchanged for vulgar saloons—until—
Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms. With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer.
By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports. These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness upon the heels of lightning.
Isaac's eyes were now strained upon the creature who was shot. He saw the man stagger, throw up his hands, and fall. He heard a groan. At that time the murderer with the smoking revolver was not more than ten paces away. As he fired, he had stopped. When he saw his victim fall, he gave a hoarse laugh.
By this time the lights in the saloon were put out, and its occupants had fled. The rustle of human buzzards flocking to the tragedy had begun. A motion that the murderer made to escape aroused the New Hampshire boy to a fierce sense of justice. A few bounds brought him by the side of the ruffian, who looked upon him with astonishment, and then with inflamed fear. Isaac furiously struck the pointed pistol to the pavement, and grasped the fellow's waist. Then he knew that he had almost met his match. Isaac held his opponent's left arm by the wrist, and tightened the vise. The murderer held the boy around his neck with a contracting grip such as only a prize-fighter understands. Neither spoke a word. It was power—power against skill.
There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called: "Police! Police!"
The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then, before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange thing happen to his wrists.
The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades, is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner, with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know better.
The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he listened to the officer's story.
"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.
Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural expression of trust returned to his face.
"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It was dark—and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from his cheeks. "Can I go now?"
Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would have known that the young man before him could no more have committed a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.
"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.
"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there? Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water, first."
"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation of a wounded beast. The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them. It is only fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am relating came to pass.
Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.
"I have done nothing to be arrested for," he ended, looking at the superintendent with his round, honest eyes. "I only did my duty as anybody else would. Now let me go. Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can get a decent night's lodging, for I am going home to-morrow. I've had enough of this city. I want to go home!"
Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came to this pathetic end. Every man in the station, from the most hardened observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved. Isaac himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned again.
The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts) busied themselves with bringing him to. From an opposite bench the murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed him. There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in a body of iron. He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from physical weakness, but because of mental anguish. Such an apparent disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the saloon-keeper's experience before.
"He is the only witness, you say, officer?" inquired the chief. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, sorr!"
"We'll have to hold him, then. It's a great pity. I don't suppose he could get a ten-dollar bail." The superintendent shook his gray head thoughtfully. His subordinates did the same, with an exaggerated air of distress.
"Where am I? Oh!" What horror in that exhalation, as Isaac realized the place he was in! He staggered to his feet.
"Give me my bag, quick!" he exclaimed. "I will go."
"I'm afraid you can't go yet." The superintendent spoke as if he hated to do his duty.
"Not go? Why not? You have no right to hold an innocent man!"
"In cases of assault and murder, the witnesses must be held until they can furnish bail. That is the law." The white-haired man hurried his explanation, as if he were ashamed of it.
"I will come back."
The officer shook his head.
"I give you my word I will." Isaac clasped the rail pleadingly.
"I'll have to lock you up to-night; the judge will settle the amount of your bail to-morrow."
"Lock me up? I tell you I have no friends here! How can I get bail? Where will you put me?"
"Show him his cell," replied the chief to his sergeant.
"Come along," said the policeman kindly. "All witnesses are treated that way. We'll give you the most comfortable quarters we've got."
He took Isaac by the arm after the professional manner. The young man flung off the touch. For an instant his eyes swept the station menacingly. What if he should exert his strength! There were two—three—four officers in the room. He might even overpower these, and dash for liberty. He saw the livid reflection of electric lights through the windows. Unconsciously he contracted his sinews, and tightened his muscles until they were rigid. Then the hopelessness of his position burst upon him like a red strontian fire. He felt blasted by his disgrace.
"What are you doing to me?" he cried out. "Put me in prison? My God! This will kill my mother!"
The next morning at ten o'clock Tom Muldoon was released on ten thousand dollars bail. The surety was promptly furnished by the alderman of the—th Ward. Muldoon was to present himself before the grand jury, which met the first Monday in each month. As this was the beginning of the month, his appearance could not be required for three weeks at least, and by mutual agreement of the district attorney and the counsel for the defendant, action might be put off for one or even for two months more, pending the recovery or eventual death of the assaulted. This would give the saloon-keeper plenty of time for the two ribs that Isaac Masters had crushed, to mend!
There are sensitive men and women who would go insane after spending an innocent night in a cell. In the dryest, the largest, the best of them there is everything to debase the manhood and nauseate the soul. The tin cup on the grated window-sill, half-filled with soup which the last occupant left; the cot to the right of the hopeless door, made of two boards and one straw mattress; and that necessity which is the nameless horror of such a narrow incarceration—that which suffocates and poisons; then the flickering jet up the concrete corridor, casting such fitful shadows by the prisoner's side that he starts from his cot in terror to touch the phantoms lest they be real; the alternate waves of choking heat and harrowing cold; the hammering of the steam-pipes; the curses, the groans, and the eruptive breathing of the sleeping and the drunken; the thoughts of home, and friends, and irreparable disgrace; the feeble hope that, after all, the family will not hear of this so far away; and the despair because they will—mad visions of suicide; blasphemy, repentant tears and prayers, each chasing the other amid the persistent thought that all things are impotent but freedom. Oh, what a night! What a night!
There are souls that have existed five, ten years under the courtine of Catharine in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress—drugged, tortured, at last killed like rats in a hole. All the while the maledict banner of the Romanoffs writhes above them. What has been the power to keep alive thousands of prisoners in those bastions, beyond the natural endurance of the flesh? The glory of principle.
No wonder that a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning; for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's courage. It is easy to die for right, but not for wrong.
There were three short flights of iron that led past tiers of cells, through the tombs, into the prisoner's dock. Isaac dully remembered the huge coils of steam-pipe that curled up the side of the wall. He thought of pythons. As he passed by, the prisoners awaiting sentence held the rods of their doors in their hands, like monkeys, and swore, and laughed, and shot questions at the keeper as he passed along.
"Have you no friends in the city?" proceeded the judge, after he had examined the witness.
Isaac shook his head disconsolately. "I have about five dollars; that is all, and my bag—and, sir, my character."
"Then I am afraid I shall have to hold you over in default of bail until the trial." The judge nodded to the sheriff to bring on the next case.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To the City Jail," answered the sheriff curtly. "Come along!" With a mighty effort Isaac wrenched himself loose, and strode to the bar.
"Judge!" he cried. "Judge, you wouldn't do that! Let me go! I will come back on the trial. Look at me, Judge! What have I done? Why should I be sent to prison? I am an honest man!"
But the judge was used to such scenes, and he turned his head wearily away.
"The law requires the government to hold the witness in default of bail, in cases of capital crime." The judge was a kind man, and he tried to do a kind act by explaining the subtle process of the law again to the lad. When he had done this, he nodded. And now the men approached Isaac to remove him, by force if necessary. But the New Hampshire boy stood before the bar of justice stolidly. His eyes wandered aimlessly, and his lips muttered. Paralysis swept near him at that instant.
"Am—I—imprisoned because I am friendless and poor? Is this your law?"
The judge shrugged his shoulders, but many in the court-room felt uncomfortable.
"Then," spoke Isaac Masters, rising to his greatest height, and uplifting his hand as if to call God to witness, "if this is law—damn your law!" It was his first and last oath. Every man in the room started to his feet at the utterance of that supreme legal blasphemy. But the judge was silent. What sentence might he not inflict for such contempt of court? What sentence could he? The witness had no money, wherewith to be fined, and he was going to prison at any rate. The judge was great enough to put himself in Isaac's place. He stroked his beard meditatively.
"Remove the witness," he said. This was sentence enough. Although two officers advanced cautiously, as if prepared for a tussle, a babe might have led the giant unto the confines of Hades by the pressure of its little finger. For Isaac wept.
"OH, MY GOD!" HE SOBBED. "MY GOD! MY GOD!"
There were two other witnesses in the white-washed cell to which Isaac was assigned. It was on the south side, and large, and sunny, and often the door was left unlocked; but the cell looked out into a crumbling grave-yard. One of these witnesses was a boy of about eighteen, pale to the suggestion of a mortal disease. It did not take Isaac long to find out that this complexion did not indicate consumption, but was only prison pallor. The other prisoner was less pathetic as to color, but he was listless and discouraged. The only amusement of these men consisted in chewing tobacco in enormous quantities, playing surreptitious games of high-low-jack, in reading the daily paper, a single magazine, and waiting for the sun to enter the barred window, and watching it in the afternoon as it slipped away. These two men tried to cheer the new comer in a rude, hearty way; but when the country lad learned that they had been in detention for six months already, held by the government as main witnesses against the first mate of their brig, their words were as dust. They only choked him.
"What did you do," Isaac asked, "to get you in such a scrape?"
"We saw the mate shoot the cook; that's all."
"If I'd known," said the pale boy, with, a look out of the window, "how Uncle Sam keeps us so long—I wished I hadn't said nothing. But we get a dollar a day; that's something." And with a sigh that he meant to engulf with his philosophy, the boy turned his face away, so that Isaac should not suspect the tears that salted the flavor of the coarse tobacco.
The dark outlook, the blind future, the hopeless cell, the disordered table, the lazy life that deadened all activity but that of the imagination, the lack of vigorous air, the lounging companionship, but, above all things, the thought of his mother and Abbie, and the brooding over what he dared to call an outrage perpetrated, in the name of the law, upon himself—these things made a turmoil of Isaac's brain. There was a daily conflict between the Christian and the criminal way of looking at his irreparable misfortune which he was surprised to find that even the possession of his father's Bible could not control.
There were times when it needed all his intelligence to keep him from springing on the keeper, and running amuck in the ward-room, simply for the sake of uttering a violent, brutal protest. Then there were hours when he was too exhausted to leave his cot. At such a time he wrote a letter, his first letter to his mother, and he made the keeper promise to have it mailed so that no one could possibly suspect that it started from a prison.
"DEAR MOTHER"—it ran—"I have not written to you for three weeks since I have been here, because I have been sick. I am now in a very safe place, and am doing pretty well. I clear my food and board and seventy-five cents a day. I have not been paid yet. I think you had better not write to me until I can give you a permanent address. I read my Bible every day and love you more dearly than ever. I have tried to do my duty as you would have me. Give my love to Abbie. I will write soon again.
"Ever your affectionate son,
"ISAAC."
The simpleton! Could he not suspect that country papers copy from city columns all that is of special local interest, and more? And did he not know that it is one of the disgraces of modern journalism that no department is so copiously edited, annotated, and illustrated as that of criminal intelligence?
Could he not surmise that on the Saturday following his incarceration the very mountains rang with the news? That it should be mangled and turned topsy-turvy, and that in the eyes of his simple-minded neighbors he should be thought of as the murderer, by reason of his great strength? For how could it come into the intelligence of law-abiding citizens and law-respecting people, that a man should be shut up in prison, no matter what the newspapers said, unless he had done something to deserve it? What did the mountaineers know about the laws of bail, and habeas corpus? And could such news, gossiped by one neighbor, repeated by another, confirmed by a third, fail to reach the desolate farm-house in which a woman, feeble, old and faint of heart, lay trembling between life and death?
The grand jury meets on the first Monday of each month to indict those for trial against whom reasonable proofs of guilt are obtained. The saloon loafer had been shot in the groin, and pending his injuries indictment was waived. In proportion as the wound proved serious and the recovery prolonged, trial was postponed.
Isaac Masters had now been locked up six weeks. He had not yet heard from home, and had only written once. About noon, one day, the keeper came to tell him that a woman wished to see him. Isaac thought that it was his mother, and the shame of meeting her in the guard-room surrounded by tiers upon tiers of murderers and thieves and petty criminals overcame him. The man of strength sat down on his cot, and putting his hands over his white face, trembled violently. The guard, who knew that Isaac was an innocent man, spoke to him kindly.
"Go! go!" said the prisoner in a voice of agony, "and tell my mother that I will be right there."
"Mother!" ejaculated the guard. "She's the youngest mother for a man of your size I ever see." He winked at the sailor, and went.
Then Isaac knew that it was Abbie, who had come alone, and he tightened his teeth and lips together, and went down.
Isaac slowly came down the perforated iron stairs that were attached to his prison wing like an inside fire-escape. On the bench in the middle of the guard-room sat Abbie—a little, helpless thing she seemed to him—facing the entrance, as if she feared to remove her eyes from the door that led to freedom.
Abbie was greatly changed. She was dressed in black. If Isaac had been a free man, this fact would have startled him. As it was, he was so spent with suffering that his dulled mind could not understand it. At first Abbie did not recognize her hearty lover. His huge frame was gaunt and wasted. His ruddy face was white, and his cheeks hung in folds like moulded putty. His country clothes dropped about him aimlessly. From crown to foot he had been devastated by unmerited disgrace. Grief may glorify; but the other ravages.
This meeting between the lovers was singularly undramatic. Each shrank a little from the other. They shook hands quietly. His was burning; her's like a swamp in October dew. He sat down beside her on the bench awkwardly, while the deputy looked at them with careless curiosity. He was used to nothing but tragedy and crime, and to his experienced mind the two had become long ago confused.
"Mother?" asked Isaac, nervously moving his feet. "Didn't she get my letter?"
The girl nodded gravely, tried to meet his eyes, and then looked away. Tears fell unresisted down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them off. It was as if she were too well acquainted with them to check their flow.
Then the truth began to filter through Isaac's bewebbed intellect. He spread his knees apart, rested his arms upon them, and bent his head to his hands. His great figure shook.
"Oh, my God!" he sobbed. "My God! My God!"
"Oh, don't, Isaac, don't!" Abbie put her hand upon his head as if he had been her boy. "Your mother was as happy as could be. She was happy to die. We buried her yesterday!"
How could she tell him that his mother had died of grief—too sorely smitten to bear it—for his sake?
But Isaac's head rose and fell—rose and fell rhythmically between his hands. His breath came in low groans, like that of an animal smitten dead by a criminally heavy load.
"She sent her love before she passed away. She wanted you to come back to the farm as soon as you could. She believed in you, Ikey, even if you were in prison. She said Paul was in prison, and that it was a terrible mistake. She knew your father's son would not depart from his God!"
As Abbie uttered this simple confession of country faith, the pitiful man lifted up his eyes from the tiled floor and looked at her gratefully. His dry lips moved, and he tried to speak.
"Yes," was all he said, with fierce humility. Then the lack of breath choked him.
"She made me promise not to give you up, and to come and see you. Of course you are innocent, Ikey?" Abbie did not look at him.
"Yes," he answered mechanically.
"I know," she said softly.
Of what use were more words? They would only beat like waves against the granite of his broken heart. The two sat silent for a time. Then Abbie said, "I must go." She edged a little towards him, and touched his coat.
"When will you come out? I will explain it all to the minister and the neighbors. We will be married as soon as you come home. She wanted us to! Oh, Ikey! Oh, Ikey! My poor—poor boy!"
Isaac arose unsteadily. It was time for her to go, for the turnkey had nodded to him.
A fierce, mad indignation at his fate and what it had wrought upon his mother and upon his honorable name blinded him. He did not even say good-by, but left the girl standing in the middle of the guard-room alone. At any cost he must get back to his cell. Supposing his mind should give way before he got there? He staggered to the stairway. He threw his hands up, and groped on the railing. A blindness struck him before he had mounted two steps. He did not hear a woman's shriek, nor the rushing of feet, nor the sound of his own fall.
When he awaked, he was alone in the witness cell; and when he put his white hands to his hair, he felt that his head was shaven. The chipper prison doctor told him that he was getting nicely over a brain fever.
It was three months after this before the case of Tom Muldoon came upon the docket. The man whom the saloon-keeper had shot had but just been declared out of clanger and on the road to recovery.
When the case was called, the district attorney arose from his desk under the bench, and represented to the court that as for some unforeseen reason the said Frank Stevens, who had been maliciously and wilfully assaulted and shot by the said Tom Muldoon, had refused to prosecute, the prosecution rested upon the government, which would rely upon the direct evidence of one witness to sustain the case.
The district attorney, who was an unbought man, and whose future election depended upon the number of convictions he secured for the State, now opened his case with such decision, vigor, and masterful certainty that the policemen and other friends of the defendant began to quake for the boss of the—th Ward.
"And now, your honor, I will call to the witness-stand a young man of stainless life, whom the government has held as a witness since the brutal assault was committed. He is in the custody of the sheriff of the county, Isaac Masters!"
All eyes turned to the door at the left of the bench. There was a bustle of expectancy, and a pallor upon the face of Tom Muldoon.
"Isaac Masters!" repeated the attorney impatiently. "Will the court officer produce the witness?"
The judge rapped his pencil on the desk in a nervous tattoo. Above all things he detested delay.
"I hope Your Honor will grant me a few moments," said the attorney, annoyed. "The witness must surely be here directly."
"It can go over—" began the judge indulgently, when he was interrupted by the entrance of the sheriff of the county himself. This man beckoned to the district attorney, and the two whispered together with the appearance of great excitement.
"Well?" said the judge, yawning. "Produce your witness."
But the attorney for the government came back to his place slowly, with head bent. He was very pale, and evidently much shaken. The saloon-keeper's face expanded with hope, as he leaned aside and whispered to a friendly wardman.
What was the evidence? Where was the witness? Silent? Why? The question flashed from face to face in the court-room. Had he escaped? Or been spirited away? Such things had been known to happen. Or had he become insane during his incarceration? Such things had been known to happen, too. Gentlemen of the law! Gentlemen of the jury! Sheriff of the county! Judge of the Superior Court! Where is the witness? We demand him on penalty of contempt. Contempt of your Honorable Court? Contempt of court!
What? Is he not here? After all this cost to the State, and to the man? Why has he not met his enforced appointment? If not here, why was the innocent witness suffocated behind bars and walls, while the murderer was free to dispense rum?
"Your Honor," began the attorney, with white lips, "a most unfortunate occurrence has happened, one that the government truly deplores. The witness has been suddenly called away. In fact, Your Honor—hem!—in short, I have been informed by the sheriff that the witness cannot answer to the summons of the court. He is disqualified from subpoena. In fact, Your Honor, the witness died this morning."
The lawyer took out his handkerchief ostentatiously. He then bent to his papers with shaking hands. He looked them over carefully while the court held its breath.
"As the government is not in possession of any evidence against Muldoon, I move to nolle prosequi the case."
"It is granted," said the judge, with a keen glance at the bloated prisoner, whom wardmen and officers of the law were already congratulating profusely.
"Order!" continued the judge. "Prisoner, stand up! You are allowed to go upon your own recognizance in the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars."
The next case was called, a new crowd entered the vitiated room, and the court proceeded with its routine as if nothing unusual had happened.
And the silent witness has passed out of every memory but mine, and that of one poor girl mourning in the New Hampshire hills.