She was silent. "If I am ever to come," said the man, "send me only the message that you need me."
He turned and was gone.
CHAPTER XX
EXPLOSIVE DUST
Every place has its own peculiar odor, from the flower and candle-smoke scent of a graceful woman's sitting-room to the tarry ropes and fish-net and canvas sails of a boat-house; from the dried earth, rustling bulb and flower-seed smell of a tool bin to the paint tubes and mustiness of old draperies and cigarette smoke of an atelier. Sunning mattresses, hot milk bottles, warming squares and talcum powders, the delicious smell of bathed baby flesh; scent of wooden pews and velvet cushions, camphored furs and stale incense of a church: every department of life, every living thing, has its haunting, significant odor.
A country court-room smells of unaired dust, of wet umbrellas and muddy rubbers, of onlookers who have handled horses and gasoline, of doctors who have come from operations. Smells of the coarse perfumes of the criminal's lady friends, the bay rum of the shining country lawyer, lemon peel and cloves chewed by such persons as even in the most stringent times of the Volstead Act appear always to have something to conceal.
When the man-of-straw of outraged community virtue is dislodged the court-room is redolent of prejudice and policy and pedantry and plausibility; of many things that lie on each other in layers like morning griddle cakes. But it seldom suggests atmosphere of health and light and true cleanliness and earnest religious progressiveness; of the earnest desire to administer true justice, of the earnest wish to analyze specific examples of crime, to conserve all goodness, to see straighter, more freely, with greater charity and more modern scientific accuracy. Of these things few court-rooms smell.
It may have been the stale, dreary, intrenched and pompous atmosphere of the Trout County court-room that finally drove the Minga Bunch from their original intention of following Terence O'Brien to the last ditch of his trial. Youthful enthusiasm and curiosity had long since died out, leaving only a grudging sense of clan obligation, and the long hours of reviewing circumstantial evidence, the cross-questioning of this and that dull witness, the peering faces of the family of the murdered man and the grim and relentless attitude of the jury, these things had somehow robbed the circumstances of all their dramatic values. The sight of Terry standing day after day in the pen, his tow-colored hair always brushed the same way, his eyes always nervously blinking the same way, and his dry mouth unable to testify in his own defense, nettled the group of young people who had interested themselves in his behalf. They had supposed the young accused would rise suddenly and pelt the people with polemics. They had looked for dynamics; they found only musty, fusty technique, sour looks of old men, rigidities of convention and a bewildered effect of vital issues lost in a grand tea-party of form and precedent.