It was a scene of pathetic interest when his aged mother, resolved upon forcing a recantation, came herself to the miller’s home. A dark, withered, white-haired crone she was, with a hooked nose and a keen, fierce, intent eye that suggested strength of mind and purpose defying age and ailments. She shrewdly questioned the boy, and sought to involve him in discrepancies and to elicit some admission that the story had been prompted by Alethea Sayles. Her dark-browed sons stood about the great white-covered ox-wagon, their bemired boots drawn high over their trousers, their broad hats pulled down to their lowering eyes, maintaining a sedulous silence. So strong a family resemblance existed between them and the dead man that ’Gustus Tom was greatly perturbed as from time to time he glanced at them; looking away instantly with a resolution to see them no more, and yet again with a morbid fascination turning his eyes to meet theirs, before whose dark and solemn anger he quailed. Now and then the sobs would burst from him, and he would lay his head on his arm against the rails, as he cowered in the fence corner; for the old woman would not enter the miller’s house, but stood upon the frozen crust of snow by the roadside, and looked upon the denuded site of the mill, and the turbulent river, and the austere bleak bluffs on the opposite bank. The miller peered out from his door, himself the impersonation of winter, his snowy locks and beard falling about his rugged face; the desolate little shanty was plainly to be seen among the naked and writhen boughs of the orchard, that bore only snow and icicles in the stead of the bloom and fruit they had known.
Cross-questioning, threats, all the devices of suggestion, availed naught. The terrible story once told, ’Gustus Tom found the pluck somehow to stand by it without other support than the uncognizant affection of sister Eudory; for the shallow Sophy cared for none of it. She came to the door once to lead the old man within from the piercing wind, and she lingered for a moment, her golden hair flying in the blast; her placid blue eyes and superficial smile underwent no change when the old woman turned away, baffled and hopeless and stricken.
“I ’lowed my son war dead,” she said to the cluster of gossips who had assisted at the colloquy. She shook her head as she leaned upon her stick, and hobbled down across the frozen ruts of the road toward the wagon. “I ’lowed my son war dead, an’ I mourned him. But I said the words of a fool, for he war alive; the best part of him, his good name, war lef’ ter me. An’ now he air beset, an’ druv, an’ run down ter death,—fur ye air a-murderin’ of him in takin’ his good name. Lemme know, neighbors,”—she turned, with her hand upon the wheel,—“when the deed air fairly done, so ez I kin gin myself ter mournin’ my son, fur then he’ll be plumb dead.”
The two dark-browed brothers said never a word; the slow oxen started; the wagon moved creaking down the road toward the snowy mountains, with their whitened slopes and black trees, and gray shadows.
The public sentiment excited in favor of Mink Lorey by the developments during his trial, and which had expressed itself in the riot and attempt at a rescue, had sustained a rebuff consequent upon his assault on Judge Gwinnan. Nevertheless, it is difficult to nullify a popular prepossession, and the discovery that the young mountaineer had been the victim of the machinations of the true criminal, that he had been placed in jeopardy, had suffered many months’ imprisonment, had still longer duress in prospect, served to justify him in some sort, and reinstated him in the feelings of the people, never very logical. All the details of the trial were canvassed anew with reviviscent interest. Now that the veil of mystery was torn from it, there seemed still other inculpations involved. It would appear to imply some gross negligence, some intentional spite, some grotesque perversion of justice, that the criminal should have been one of the jury impaneled to try an innocent man. The fact itself was shocking. It was significant that only through accident had it come to light, and it augured grievous insecurity of liberty, life and property.
Mr. Harshaw, who had returned to Shaftesville upon the adjournment, for a few days, of the Legislature, was not slow to note the direction and progress of popular favor. In the state of his feelings toward Gwinnan, he had no great impulse to combat the position taken by the unlearned that it was a grave dereliction on the part of the court that Pete Rood had been admitted to the panel. Why should he expound the theory of judicial challenges, the conclusiveness of the voir dire, in instances of general eligibility? He truly believed that in the incarceration of the jury Gwinnan had sacrificed the interests of the defense and a favorable verdict, and as he felt much reminiscent interest in the details of his cases, he could listen with all the relish of mental affirmation to the denunciations of the stranger judge, who was often profanely apostrophized and warned to show his head no more in Cherokee County.
“Somebody besides Mink Lorey’ll try ter beat some sense inter it, ef he do,” said Bylor. The bitterness of the affront offered to the jury by their imprisonment had grown more poignant as time went on, for while the general excitement had gradually subsided, the fact remained. Not one of the unlucky panel, venturing from time to time into town with peltry, or game, or produce for sale, could escape the gibes and laughter of retrospective ridicule. The dignity of the interests involved had ceased to be a shield to them. Even the acrimony excited by their failure to agree had yielded to light sarcasm and jocose scorn,—not ill-natured, perhaps, but sufficiently nettling to proud and sensitive men whom accident had succeeded in immuring behind the bars. Everywhere the subject lurked in ambuscade,—in the stores, at the tavern, on the streets. The jailer was the most hospitable man alive. “When’ll ye kem an’ take pot-luck agin, gentlemen?” he would hail them in chance encounters. “My door air easy ter open—from the outside.” Or he would call out, with a roguish twinkle in his brown eyes, “How’s ’rithmetic up in the cove?” in allusion to the unlucky thirteen on the panel. It seemed to them that humiliation was their portion, and the festive and gala occasion known as “goin’ ter town,” which had hitherto been so replete with excitement and interest, and was in the nature of a tour and a recompense of toil, had resolved itself into a series of mortifications.
Harshaw’s law-office proved in some sort a refuge to the coterie, as it had always been more or less a resort. It had some of the functions of a club-house, and its frequenters felt hardly less at home than its proprietor. He was a man difficult to be taken amiss by his country friends. He had a sonorous, hearty greeting for whoever came. If he were at work, half a dozen sprawling fellows talking about his fireside were no hindrance to the flow of his thought, the scratch of his pen, or the chase of some elusive bit of legal game through the pages of a law-book. More often he bore a part in the conversation. The bare floor defied the red clay mire that came in with the heavy boots; the broken bricks in the hearth were not more unsightly in his eyes for the stains of tobacco juice. The high mantelpiece was ornamented by a box of tobacco, a can of kerosene, and an untrimmed lamp that asserted its presence in unctuous odors. There were some of the heavy books of his profession in a case, and many more lying in piles on the floor, near the walls, defenseless against the borrower. There was a window on one side of the office, and another opening upon the street. At this a face was often applied, with a pair of hands held above the eyes to shut out the light, that the passer-by might scan the interior, perchance to see if someone sought were within; perchance merely to regale an idle curiosity. The unique proceeding occasioned no comment and gave no offense. An open door showed an inner apartment, where consultations were held when too important for the ear of the indiscriminate groups in the main office, and where there was a lounge, on which he slept during court week, or when political business was too brisk to admit of his driving out to his home on his farm, some miles from the town.
“Well,” said Harshaw, tilting his chair back upon its hind legs until it creaked and quaked with the weight, and clasping both hands behind his yellow head, “I wonder you ain’t willing for Gwinnan to be a fool, considering what Mink got for beating his skull into a different shape.”
The county boasted no weekly newspaper, and without it the news was a laggard. Ben Doaks looked up with interest; Bylor paused expectant. Jerry Price, too, was present, for there was an unusual number from the coves in town—this was county court week, and the crowd assembled offered special facilities for trading stock and small commodities.