Smoking flax

by Hallie Erminie Rives

The selection of the jury occupied the greater portion of the morning, but at length twelve citizens were impaneled and listened to the reading of the indictment.

The temper of the people might be seen in the burst of rage that swept over the crowd when the atrocious deed was described.

Elliott Harding, with his usual aspect of dignity, had schooled his face into a cold passiveness, but though outwardly calm, his pulse was throbbing with the fierceness of fever beats. A stranger entering the courtroom would never have selected him from the group of men as the one whose life had been crushed out by the object of this trial.

When the reading was finished, the witnesses for the state were called. The first name which rang through the courtroom was that of John Holmes. The prisoner drew himself together and watched him keenly as the oath was administered; his face, despite its defiant mask, had a restless, haunted look which sat strangely on his hard, grim features.

Skillfully aided by questions from the court, Holmes unfolded the whole awful story of the first discovery of the dead body of Dorothy Carr. Passing rapidly over the painful details, the sheriff told then of the man-hunt, of the finding of the bloody razor as it had dropped from the pocket of the prisoner’s coat.

The negro cook of the Carrs swore that the prisoner was the man to whom she had given a drink of water about half an hour before her mistress had been brought home.

Toward the close of the State’s evidence, the chain binding the prisoner to the gallows had become all but complete. In the face of such evidence and in the atmosphere of such bitter resentment, the counsel appointed for his defense struggled against overwhelming odds.

He contented himself with belittling the value of circumstantial evidence adduced by the prosecution, and presenting the argument that the prisoner’s education and his social position as a school teacher attested to his inability to commit a crime so revolting in its conception and so brutal in its execution. He stated that the woman at whose house the prisoner had been arrested, had repeatedly said that he had been at her house, some fifteen miles away from the scene of the crime, at the very hour the deed was said to have been committed, that she would testify to that statement here if she had not moved away and could not now be located. Whatever effect the counsel thus produced was more than neutralized when the prisoner was called to the stand for a specious denial.

The sinister fear with which the negro peered about the courtroom, the affected nonchalance and thinly veiled defiance of his mumbled answers told damningly against him. The passions of raging fear and terror had driven from his low-browed face every trace of intellectuality or culture, leaving only the cunning cruelty and ferocity of the animal. His cross-examination left him without a vestige of self control, and before it had well finished, in a violent passion he poured forth a volley of oaths, his huge frame quivering as he burst into a raving, shrieking arraignment of the white man, in which he had to be almost throttled into silence by the deputies.

When the prosecuting attorney arose to review the case, there hung over the courtroom the ominous hush that is significant of but one thing. After a brief recital of the details of the evidence, the counsel appealed to the jury to do its sworn duty.