“You do know, though, that the man on guard duty—the man with whom you spoke outside—was Private Severance, also from the so-called Kentucky feud belt and a friend of the sick man?”
“I can testify of my own knowledge only that he was Private Severance and that he and Grant were of the same platoon—Lieutenant Spurrier’s.”
The defense advocate paused and carefully framed a hypothetical question to be answered by the witness as a medical expert.
“I will now ask you to speak from your knowledge of blood tendencies as affected or distorted by mental abnormalities. Suppose a man to have been born and raised under a code which still adheres to feudal violence and the private avenging of personal grievances both real and fancied. Suppose such a man to have conceived a bitter hatred against his commanding officer and to have brooded over that hatred until it had become a fixed idea—a monomania—a determination to kill; suppose such a man to have known only the fierce influences of his retarded hills until he came 17 into the army and to have encountered there a discipline which seemed to him a tyranny. I will ask you whether such a man might not be apt to react to a homicidal mania under nervous derangement, and whether such a homicidal mania might not develop its own craftiness of method?”
“Such,” testified the medical officer, “is a conceivable but a highly imaginative possibility.”
Then Private Severance was called and came into the room, where he stood smartly at attention until instructed to take the witness chair. This dark-haired private from the Cumberlands looked the soldier from crown to sole leather, yet his features seemed to hold under their present repose an ancient stamp of sullenness. It was an intangible quality rather than an expression, as though it bore less relation to his present than to some unconquerable survival from generations that had passed on; generations that had been always peering into shadows and searching them for lurking perils.
In his speech lingered quaintly remnants of dialect from the laureled hills that army life had failed to eradicate, and in his manner one could note a wariness of extreme caution. That was easy to understand, because Private Severance, too, stood under the charge of having permitted a prisoner to escape, and his evidence would confront him later when he in turn occupied the dock.
“I didn’t have no speech with Bud Grant that night,” he testified, “but I’d looked in some several times through the window. It was a barred window, an’ every time I peeked through it I could see Bud 18 layin’ there asleep. The moon fell acrost his cot so I could see him plain.”
“When did you see him last?”
“After Major James had been in and come out—a full fifteen minutes later. I’m able to swear to that, because I noticed the moon just as the major went out, and, when I looked in through the window the last time, the moon was a full quarter hour lower down to’rds settin’.”