Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

"Friend of the prisoner?"

"No."

He said something to another officer and I was taken to an enclosed space (around which was a low railing) and given a chair. I afterward learned that it was in this place the witnesses were seated. He had evidently not believed what I said.

There was a hum of quiet talk in the room, which was ill-ventilated and filled with men and boys and a few women. Of the latter there were but two who were not of the lower grades of life. But there were all grades of men and boys. The boys appeared to look upon it as a sort of matinee to which they had gained free admission.

The trial was one of unusual interest. It had been going on for several days. The man on trial (who was twenty-four years of age and of a well-to-do laboring class,) had shot and killed his rival in the affections of a girl of fourteen. Some months previous, he had been cut in the face, and one eye destroyed, by the man he afterward killed, who was at the time of the killing out on bail for this offense. I had learned these points from the scraps of conversation outside the court room, and from the court officer. This was the last day of the trial. There was to be the summing up of the defense, the speech of the prosecutor, the charge of the judge, and the verdict of the jury.

The prisoner sat near the jury box, pale and stolid looking. The spectators laughed and joked. Court officers and lawyers moved about and chaffed one another. There was nothing solemn, nothing dignified, nothing to suggest the awful fact that here was a man on trial for his life, who, if found guilty, was to be deliberately killed by the State after days of inquiry, even as his victim had been killed, in the heat of passion and jealousy, by him.

The State was proposing to take this man's life to teach other men not to commit murder.

"Hats off!"

The door near the Judge's dais had been opened by an officer, who had shouted the command as a rotund and pleasant-faced gentleman, with decidedly Hibernian features, entered.

He took his seat on the raised platform beneath a red canopy. The buzz of voices had ceased when the order to remove hats was given. It now began again in more subdued tones. In a few moments the prisoner's lawyer—one of the prominent men of the bar—began his review of the case. He pointed out the provocation, the jealousy, the previous assault—the results of which were the ghastly marks and the sightless eye of the face before them. He plead self defense and said over and over again, "If I had been tried as he was, if I had been disfigured for life, if I had had the girl I loved taken from me, I'd have killed the man who did it, long ago! We can only wonder at this man's forbearance!"