"Fine day," he said.
Archie did not reply. He hated Danner more than he hated most people, and he hated every one, almost--save Marriott and Gusta, and his father and mother and the kids, and Elizabeth, who, as Marriott had reported to him, wished him well. The air and the light gave him pain--he shrank from them; he had not been outdoors since that day, a month before, when he had been taken over with Curly to be arraigned. He looked on the world again, the world that was so strange and new. Once more there swept over him that queer sensation that always came as he stepped out of prison, the sensation of fear, of uncertainty, a doubt of reality, the blur before his eyes. The streets were deserted, the houses still. The snow crunched frigidly under his heels. The handcuff chain clicked in the frost. A wagon turned the corner; the driver walked beside his steaming horses and flapped his arms about his shoulders; the wheels whined on the snow. Archie looked at the man; it was strange, he felt, that a man should be free to walk the streets and flap his arms that way.
XIII
The court-room was already crowded and buzzed with a pleasant yet excited hum of voices. Mrs. Koerner, the first to appear that morning, had been given a seat directly in front of the bailiff's elevated desk, where she was to sit, a conspicuous figure of sorrow through all the trial. The twenty-four aged men of the special venire were seated inside the bar; the reporters were at their table; two policemen, wearing their heavy overcoats as if they were no discomfort at all, were gossiping together; Giles, the court stenographer, grown old in automatic service, wandered about in a thin coat with ragged sleeves, its shoulders powdered by dandruff. The life that for so many years had been unfolded to him in a series of dramatic tableaux could have interested him but little; he seemed, indeed, to have reduced it to mere symbols--dashes, pothooks, points and outlines. At one of the trial tables sat Marriott. He was nervous, not having slept well the night before. At the table with him was Pennell, the young lawyer with the gift of the gab, who had been so unfortunate as to win the oratorical prize in college. Pennell, at the last moment, somehow--Marriott never knew exactly how--had insinuated himself into the case. He explained his appearance by saying, in his grand, mysterious way, that he had been engaged by "certain influential friends" of Archie's, who preferred to remain unknown. Archie, who did not know that he had any influential friends, could not explain Pennell's presence, but, feeling that the more lawyers he had the better, he was secretly glad, and Marriott, who bowed before the whole situation in a kind of helpless fatalism, made no objection.
But suddenly a change occurred. The atmosphere became electric. Men started up, their eyes glistened, they leaned forward, a low murmur arose; the old bailiff started violently, smote his marble slab with his gavel, and Mark Bentley, very red in the face, was seen striding toward the door, waving his authoritative hand and calling:
"Back there! Get back, I tell you!"
Archie had just been brought in. Danner led him to the trial table, and he took his seat, hid his manacled hands, and sat motionless, gazing straight before him, unconsciously obeying some long-hidden, obscure instinct of the hunted. But Marriott's hand had found his.
"How did you sleep last night?"
"Pretty well," said Archie as politely as possible, the occasion seeming to require those conventionalities of which he was so very uncertain.
"Well, we'll soon be at it now," said Marriott, thinking, however, of his own wretched night.