The Bondboy

by George W. Ogden

The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and close around the building.

In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of these spreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a giant tree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place. It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fine old days before the war.

There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one of the logs of the original court-house, built in that square more than sixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for the murder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summer days, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirring incidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut in the tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recall memories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.

Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now, scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway 242 leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn half-way to the top.

The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels of reluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be pronounced upon them, had kicked it in protest as they passed. It was as solemn and gloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had gone up it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treads were worn to splinters; its balustrade was hacked by the knives of generations of loiterers. There was no window in the wall giving upon it; darkness hung over its first landing on the brightest day. The just and the unjust alike were shrouded in its gloomy penumbra as they passed. It was the solemn warder at the gate, which seemed to cast a taint over all who came, and fasten a cloud upon them which they must stand in the white light of justice to purge away.

When the civil war began, the flag of the Union was taken down from the cupola of the court-house. In all the years that had passed since its close, the flag never had been hoisted to its place of honor again. That event was not to take place, indeed, until twenty years or more after the death of Isom Chase, when the third court-house was built, and the old generation had passed away mainly, and those who remained of it had forgotten. But that incident is an incursion into matters which do not concern this tale.

Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcely astir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons of farmers and the straggling troops of horsemen from far-lying districts began to come in and seek hitching-room around the court-house square. It looked very early in the day as if there was going to be an unusual crowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.

Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spread wider than the sound of the best deeds of 243 the worthiest man in the county. It was not so much on account of the notoriety of the old man, which had not died with him, as the mystery in the manner of his death, that people were anxious to attend the trial.

It was not known whether Joe Newbolt was to take the witness-stand in his own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; under the law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of his testimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor’s hand. Joe would be confronted with that, and, if there was a spark of spunk in him, people said, he would rise up and stand by it. And then, once Sam Lucas got him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions and concealments.

Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state had summoned forty witnesses; Hammer’s list was half as long. It was a question in the public speculation what either side expected to prove or disprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to prove very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw of his client’s well-known honesty and clean past.