The champion

by Charles Egbert Craddock

All this served to increase the strength of the foreman's suspicions. Ned grew conscious of this accession of wonder and doubt that began to envelop him like a veritable atmosphere. So strong were these suspicions that they began to take on the quality of a grim certainty and definite menace. He was aware that they concerned others even more than himself, but who and how he could not for his life divine. He often went over in his mind the details of all the conversations he had heard; he recapitulated the impressions made upon him by gestures, significant glances, all the indicia of unexpressed sentiment, and strove to deduce the meaning of it all and its effect on the future. But these speculations at last availed naught, and as the time for his trial approached the recollection was displaced by his anxiety on his own account, and the deep despondency which the sight of his mother's distress induced in him.

One evening—the long lingering summer twilight still lay upon the roofs and spires—he strolled into the composing-room. It was quite deserted,—a gas-jet here and there, burning dim and low, only accented the gloom. Through the open window he could hear the gay chorus of an opera al fresco in a neighboring beer-garden. In emulation, perhaps, a mocking-bird in a cage in a barber-shop below mounted his perch and filled the gas-lit atmosphere, redolent of bay rum and eau de cologne, with his soft ecstatic roundelay. Ned soon tired of looking out of the window. He had not read at all of late; he had been so absorbed by his troubles that he had not cared to keep posted with the times. As to self-education, of which he had once been so ambitious, he asked himself bitterly what was the use of education to a boy who might spend years and years—the best years of his life—behind the bars.

This evening, however, the old craving came back to him in a measure. He stood irresolute for a moment. Then he turned to the case near by. He was not very expert in deciphering written characters. He often sought by practice to remedy this deficiency. He found generally ample exercise for this inability in the crabbed chirography of the editor-in-chief. Now as he turned up the gas he recognized the august scrawl of that magnate in the "copy" perched above the case.

The next instant his heart gave a great bound. His blood rushed to his head, beating tumultuously for a moment; then it receded, leaving him pale and dizzy, and feeling as if he were likely to faint.

For he saw written there the name of the manager-owner of the theatre, coupled with an odious accusation of burning the building, which no one could know so well as Ned was odiously false.

Ned now learned for the first time that the hot-headed Gorham had taken offense at some expressions in relation to the affair which the paper, surcharged with its grave suspicions, had inadvertently let fall. He had construed this as a reflection upon himself. Arrogant in his innocence, he had published a card—somewhat braggadocio in its tone, it must be confessed—in which he defied the editor to speak out his suspicions plainly, or be branded forever as a coward and a calumniator.

It was the editor's reply which Ned had chanced upon. The newspaper, through its many resources of procuring information, had learned that the insurance companies were on the point of formally refusing to make good the loss on the score of fraud; legal proceedings would doubtless be instituted on both sides. The time for the paper's "scoop" had arrived opportunely with the moment when it was necessary for the editor to answer the allegations against himself.

He had spoken, therefore, and spoken to the point. It had made a very disastrous showing for the owner, although the editor avoided distinct averments. He permitted it to be seen that the manager had given cause for the strongest inferences against him, even to the extent that he had procured the destruction of his own theatre for the sake of securing the money for which it was insured. The point that struck Ned's attention chiefly was the declaration that the boy who had been accused of complicity in the crime and arrested had been bailed by parties who were total strangers to the prisoner and all his friends. When interviewed, one of these sureties, a well-known broker, had given the most casual answers, excusing himself by reason of a flurry in certain stocks in which his customers were largely interested, and which absorbed his attention. The other bondsman, a brother of the broker, admitted frankly and boldly that he had never seen the boy till he went on his bond, and "wouldn't know him now from a gate-post;" and although he and his brother had acted entirely on their own responsibility in the matter and would make good the bond should the boy forfeit the bail, they undertook the liability solely to oblige Mr. Gorham, their close friend, who did not desire to keep so young a lad imprisoned so long a time, while there was still doubt of his guilt, and who had even offered to stand in behind them and pay the money himself should the boy give them the slip. Thus, the editor argued, Mr. Gorham played the double part of prosecutor and in effect bondsman for the prisoner.

Ned's hand shook. So it was to Manager Gorham he was indebted for his liberty. He could not for his life imagine why Gorham had come to his relief. But he was sharp enough to see, when it had been put before the mind in this plain way, that most outsiders would take the same view of it that the editor did; it was evidently the journal's opinion that the manager feared that the boy, if refused bail, would speak out and accuse him of himself burning or procuring the destruction of the building. The editor concluded, perhaps by way of vindicating his own courage and "taking the dare," by advising the insurance companies to pay nothing till their investigations should have been pushed in this direction, and he recommended the owner of the theatre to the kind attention of the grand jury and the attorney for the State.

Ned, in an agony of remorse and anxiety, clung to the case, almost overpowered by the realization how evil a thing concealment is, and what ruin it had wrought here. The incendiaries, he reflected, had doubtless made their escape in this long interval. He and his fears and his groundless reasoning were responsible for that,—for more!—for the blasting of an honest man's character and the wreck of his fortune, for the insurance companies would pay naught! It seemed a grotesque libel on likelihood, but the manager might even be arrested, tried, and serve a long term in the penitentiary, charged with burning his own house to defraud the insurance companies, because of the wickedness of a gang of knaves and a foolish boy's folly.