“What made you so determined to have the thing, Nick?” Mead asked, examining the braid.
Nick gave a twist to the ends of his mustache and looked contemplatively at the ceiling. “Well,” he said slowly, and there were signs of the Irish roll in his voice, “it was my scalp. I took it, first, and then I was after payin’ for it. Sure and I wanted it, Emerson, to remind me not to mix my drinks again. It’s my pledge to take whisky straight and beer the next day. And I sure reckon whenever I look at it I’ll say to myself, ‘Nick, you’ve been a blooming, blasted, balky, blithering, bildaverous idiot once too often. Don’t you do it again.’”
Notwithstanding his feeling about it, Ellhorn went away and forgot the earnest of his future good behavior. Emerson smiled that evening as he saw it trailing its snaky length over the back of a chair and stuffed it in the side pocket of his coat, thinking he would give it to Ellhorn the next time his friend should come to the jail.
Judge Harlin thought Emerson Mead unaccountably despondent about the probable outcome of his trial, and at times even indifferent to his fate. He wondered much why this man, formerly of such buoyant and determined nature, should suddenly collapse, in this weak-kneed fashion, lose all confidence in himself, and seem to care so little what happened to him. The lawyer finally decided that it was all on account of his client’s honesty and uprightness of character, which would not allow him, being guilty, to make an effort to prove that he was not, and he lived in daily expectation of an order from Mead to change his plea to guilty. The time was drawing near for the opening of the case when Judge Harlin one day hurried excitedly to the jail for a conference with Mead.
“Emerson,” he said, “some member of the last grand jury has been leaking, and it has come to my ears that testimony was given there by some one who declared he saw you kill Whittaker. And I’ve just found out that the other side has got a witness, presumably the same one, who will swear to the same thing.”
Mead’s face set into a grim defiance that rejoiced Harlin more than anything that had happened since his client’s imprisonment, as he answered:
“I’ve been expecting this. Who is it and what’s his testimony?”
“I haven’t been able to learn any details about it—merely that he will swear he saw you kill Whittaker. I’m not positive who the man is, but I feel reasonably sure I’ve spotted him. I think he is a Mexican, a red-headed Mexican, called Antone Colorow.”
Mead nodded. “I think likely,” he said, and then he told Judge Harlin how Antone had tried to lasso him and of the angry man’s threats of revenge for his broken wrists. “I’ve expected all along,” he added, “that they’d come out with some such lay as that. I don’t see how we can buck against it,” he went on, despondently, “for I can’t prove an alibi. Unless you can break down his testimony we might as well give up.”
“I guess there won’t be any difficulty about that,” said Harlin assuringly. “What you’ve just told me will be a very important matter, and if I can keep Mexicans off the jury it won’t take much to convince Americans that he is lying, just because he is a Mexican.”