“Me guy you?” repeated young Morton, elevating his brows. “I'd as soon think of deriding a king with crown and scepter!”
My trial came on within a month. Big Kennedy had a genius for expedition, and could hurry both men and events whenever it suited his inclinations. When I went to the bar I was accompanied by two of the leaders of the local guild of lawyers. These were my counsel, and they would leave no stone unturned to see me free. Big Kennedy sat by my side when the jury was empaneled.
“We've got eight of 'em painted,” he whispered. “I'd have had all twelve,” he continued regretfully, “but what with the challengin', an' what with some of 'em not knowin' enough, an' some of 'em knowin' too much, I lose four. However, eight ought to land us on our feet.”
There were no Irishmen in the panel, and I commented on the fact as strange.
“No, I barred th' Irish,” said Big Kennedy. “Th' Irish are all right; I'm second-crop Irish—bein' born in this country—myself. But you don't never want one on a jury, especially on a charge of murder. There's this thing about a Mick: he'll cry an' sympathize with you an' shake your hand, an' send you flowers; but just th' same he always wants you hanged.”
As Big Kennedy had apprehended, the Judge on the bench was set hard and chill as Arctic ice against me; I could read it in his jadestone eye. He would do his utmost to put a halter about my neck, and the look he bestowed upon me, menacing and full of doom, made me feel lost and gallows-ripe indeed. Suppose they should hang me! I had seen Sheeny Joe dispatched for Sing Sing from that very room! The memory of it, with the Judge lowering from the bench like a death-threat, sent a cold thought to creep and coil about my heart and crush it as in the folds of a snake.
There came the pawnbroker to swear how he sold me the knife those years ago. The prosecution insisted as an inference drawn from this, that the knife was mine. Then a round dozen stood up to tell of my rush upon Jimmy the Blacksmith; and how he fell; and how, a moment later, I fronted them with the red knife in my clutch and the dead man weltering where he went down. Some there were who tried to say they saw me strike the blow.
While this evidence was piling up, ever and again some timid juryman would glance towards Big Kennedy inquiringly. The latter would send back an ocular volley of threats that meant death or exile should that juror flinch or fail him.
When the State ended, a score of witnesses took the stand in my behalf. One and all, having been tutored by Big Kennedy, they told of the thrown knife which came singing through the air like a huge hornet from the far outskirts of the crowd. Many had not seen the hand that hurled the knife; a few had been more fortunate, and described him faithfully as a small lean man, dark, a red silk cloth over his head, and earrings dangling from his ears.
“He was a sailorman, too,” said one, more graphic than the rest; “as I could tell by the tar on his hands an' a ship tattooed on th' back of one of 'em. He stood right by me when he flung the knife.”