The sympathy of the community was with young Jim—and the law of the land was dead against him on all counts. He had not fired in sudden heat and passion; there had been time, as the statutes measured time, for due deliberation. However great the provocation and by local standards the provocation had been great enough and pressing hard to the breaking point, he could not claim self-defense. Even though Fleming's purpose had been, ultimately, to bring things to a violent issue, he was retreating, actually, at the moment itself. As a bar to punishment for homicide, the plea of temporary insanity had never yet been set up in our courts. Jim Faxon was fast in the snarls of the law.
From the lock-up he went to the county jail, the charge, wilful and premeditated murder. Dr. Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg and Major Covington, all customers of the accused, and all persons of property, stood ready to go bail for him in any sum namable, but murder was not bailable. In time a grand jury buttressed the warrant with an indictment—murder in the first degree, the indictment read—and young Jim stayed in jail awaiting his trial when circuit court should open in the spring.
Nobody, of course, believed that his jury would vote the extreme penalty. The dead man's probable intentions and his past reputation, taken with the prisoner's youth and good repute, would stand as bars to that, no matter how the letter of the law might read; but it was generally accepted that young Jim would be found guilty of manslaughter. He might get four years for killing old Ranee, or six years or even ten—this was a subject for frequent discussion. There was no way out of it. People were sorrier than ever for Jim and for his aunt and for the tacky, pretty little Hardin girl.
All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed forlorn pair, together minded the stall on the market, accepting gratefully the silent sympathy that some offered them, and the awkward words of good cheer from others. Miss Puss put a mortgage of five hundred dollars on her little place out in the edge of town. With the money she hired Dabney Prentiss, the most silvery tongued orator of all the silver tongues at the county bar, to defend her nephew. And every day, when market hours were over, in rain or snow or shine, the two women would drive in their truck wagon up to the county jail to sit with young Jim and to stay with him in his cell until dark.
Spring came earlier than common that year. The robins came back from the Gulf in February on the tail of a wet warm thaw. The fruit trees bloomed in March and by the beginning of April everything was a vivid green and all the trees were clumped with new leaves. Court opened on the first Monday.
On the Sunday night before the first Monday, Judge Priest sat on his porch as the dusk came on, laving his spirits in the balm of the young spring night. In the grass below the steps the bull-cricket that wintered under Judge Priest's front steps was tuning his fairy-fiddle at regular, half-minute intervals. Bull bats on the quest for incautious gnats and midges were flickering overhead, showing white patches on the tinder sides of their long wings. A flying squirrel, the only night-rider of the whole squirrel tribe, flipped out of his hole in a honey locust tree, and cocked his head high, and then he spread the furry gray membranes along his sides and sailed in a graceful, downward swoop to the butt of a silver leaf poplar, fifty feet away, where he clung against the smooth bark so closely and so flatly he looked like a little pelt stretched and nailed up there to dry.
The front gate clicked and creaked. The flying squirrel flipped around to the safe side of his tree and fled upward to the shelter of the branches, like a little gray shadow, and Judge Priest, looking down the aisle of shady trees, saw two women coming up the walk toward him, their feet crunching slowly on the gravel. He laid his pipe aside and pulled chairs forward for his callers, whoever they might be. They were right up to the steps before he made them out—Miss Puss Whitley and little Emmy Hardin.
“Howdy do, ladies,” said the old Judge with his homely courtesy. “Howdy, Miss Puss? Emmy, child, how are you? Come in and set down and rest yourselves.”
But for these two, this was no time for the small civilities. The weight of trouble at their hearts knocked for utterance at their lips. Or, at least, it was so with the old aunt.
“Jedge Priest,” she began, with a desperate, driven eagerness, “we've come here tonight to speak in private with you about my boy—about Jimmy.”