He admitted having had the dynamite in his pocket when arrested, but said he had taken it from the engine to prevent its exploding and wrecking the locomotive. He said he had quarrelled with the engineer of Blackwings at first, but later they came to an understanding. He then gave the young runner some fatherly advice, and started to leave when he was arrested.
Although he told his story in a straightforward honest way, it was, upon the face of it, so inconsistent that even the loafers, changing feet again, pitied the prisoner and many of them actually left the room before the judge could pronounce sentence. Moran was held, of course, and sent to jail without bail. He had hosts of friends, but somehow they all appeared to be busy that evening and only a few called to see him.
One man, not of the Brotherhood, said to himself that night as he went to his comfortable bed: "I will not forsake the company, neither will I forsake Dan Moran until he has been proven guilty."
CHAPTER THIRTEENTH
While Dan Moran was being examined in Judge Meyer's ill-smelling court in Chicago a coroner's jury was sitting on the body of the dead engineer at Galesburg. Hundreds of people had been at the station and witnessed the arrival of the express train that came in with a dead engine, with snow on her headlight, and a dead engineer hanging out of the window. Hundreds of people could testify that this had happened, but none of them knew what had caused the death of the engine-driver. Medical experts who were called in to view the body could find no marks of violence upon it and, in order to get out of a close place without embarrassment, agreed that the engineer had died of heart failure. This information, having been absorbed by the jury, they gave in a verdict to that effect. If the doctors had said, "He died for want of breath," the verdict would no doubt have agreed perfectly with what the doctors said.
After the train had arrived and the coroner was called and had taken the dead man from the engine, Barney Guerin had wandered into a small hotel near the station and engaged a room for the night. Being the only person on the engine at the time of the engineer's death, Guerin was very naturally attracting the attention of the railway officials, and calling about him, unconsciously, all the amateur detectives and newspaper reporters in the place. Fortunately for him, he was arrested, upon a warrant sworn out by the station agent, and lodged in jail before the reporters got at him. Here he was visited by a local lawyer, for the company, and instructed to say nothing whatever about the death of Cowels.
Upon the announcement of the verdict of the coroner's jury the prisoner was released, and returned to Chicago by the same train that bore the remains of the dead engineer.
Guerin, whose heart was as big as his body and as tender as a woman's, hastened to the home of his late companion and begged the grief-sick widow to allow him to be of some service to her. His appearance (she had known him by sight) excited her greatly for she knew he had been arrested as the murderer of her husband.
The news he brought of the verdict of the coroner's jury, which his very presence corroborated, quieted her and she began to ask how it had all happened.
Guerin began cautiously to explain how the engineer had died, still remembering the lawyer's advice, but before he had gone a dozen words the poor woman wept so bitterly that he was obliged to discontinue the sad story.