His hair was long, iron-gray, and thick; he wore it brushed straight back from his brow, without a parting or a break. It lay in place so smoothly and persistently through all the labor of his long days, that strangers were sometimes misled into the belief that it was not his own. This peculiar fashion of dressing his hair, taken with the length and leanness of his jaw, gave the judge a cast of aquiline severeness which his gray eyes belied when they beamed over the tops of his glasses at floundering young counsel or timid witness.
Yet they could shoot darts of fire, as many a rash lawyer who had fallen under their censure could bear witness. At such moments the judge had a peculiar habit of drawing up his long back and seemingly to distend himself with all the dignity which his cumulative years and honors had endured, and of bowing his neck to make the focus of his eyes more direct as he peered above his rimless glasses. He did not find it necessary to reprimand an attorney often, never more than once, but these occasions never were forgotten. In his twenty-five years’ service on the bench, he never had been reversed.
Joe felt a revival of hope again under the influence of these preparations for the trial. Perhaps Alice was there, somewhere among the people back in the room, he thought. And 252 the colonel, also, and maybe Morgan. Who could tell? There was no use in abandoning hope when he was just where he could see a little daylight.
Joe sat up again, and lifted his head with new confidence. His mother sat beside him, watching everything with a sharpness which seemed especially bent on seeing that Joe was given all his rights, and that nothing was omitted nor slighted that might count in his favor.
She watched Hammer, and Captain Taylor; she measured Sam Lucas, the prosecutor, and she weighed the judge. When Hammer did something that pleased her, she nodded; when the prosecutor interposed, or seemed to be blocking the progress of the case, she shook her head in severe censure.
And now Joe came in for his first taste of the musty and ancient savor of the law. He had hoped that morning to walk away free at evening, or at least to have met the worst that was to come, chancing it that Morgan failed to appear and give him a hand. But he saw the hours waste away with the most exasperating fiddling, fussing and scratching over unprofitable straw.
What Hammer desired in a juryman, the prosecuting attorney was hotly against, and what pleased the state’s attorney seemed to give Hammer a spasmodic chill. Instead of selecting twelve intelligent men, the most intelligent of the sixty empaneled, both Hammer and the prosecutor seemed determined to choose the most dense.
That day’s sweating labor resulted in the selection of four jurymen. Hammer seemed cheered. He said he had expected to exhaust the panel and get no more than two, at the best. Now it seemed as if they might secure the full complement without drawing another panel, and that would save them at least four days. That must have been an exceedingly lucky haul of empty heads, indeed.
Joe could not see any reason for elation. The prospect 253 of freedom–or the worst–had withdrawn so far that there was not even a pin-point of daylight in the gloom. Alice had not shown her face. If she had come at all, she had withheld herself from his hungry eyes. His heart was as bleak that night as the mind of the densest juryman agreed upon between Hammer and the attorney for the state.
Next day, to the surprise of everybody, the jury was completed. And then there followed, on the succeeding morning, a recital by the prosecuting attorney of what he proposed and expected to prove in substantiation of the charge that Joe Newbolt had shot and killed Isom Chase; and Hammer’s no shorter statement of what he was prepared to show to the contrary.