Meet me outside O. B. 10.30 tomorrow. Murder trial: a strange and terrible drama of passion for two students of the human comedy! E. A.
On the following morning, the Sailor had already mingled with the crowd outside the Old Bailey when, punctual to the minute, he was joined by his friend.
"It's brave of you to face it," was his greeting.
Mr. Ambrose little knew the things he had faced in the course of his five and twenty years of life, was the thought that ran in the mind of the Sailor.
They made their way in, and became witnesses of the drama that the law was preparing to unfold.
The judge began the proceedings, or rather the proceedings began themselves, with a kind of grotesque dignity. After the jury had been sworn, the prisoner was brought into the dock. Henry Harper gazed at him with an emotion of dull horror. In an instant, he had recognized Mr. Thompson, the mate of the Margaret Carey.
There could be no doubt it was he. Alexander Thompson was the name given in the indictment; besides, the Sailor would have known anywhere that shaggy and hirsute man who had cast such a shadow across his youth. There he was, that grim figure! He had changed, and yet he had not changed. The long, lean, angular body was the same in every awkward line, but the deadly pallor of the face was horrible to see. It was Mr. Thompson right enough, and yet it was not Mr. Thompson at all.
A surge of memories came upon Henry Harper as he sat in that court. They were so terrible that he could hardly endure them. He did not hear a word that was being spoken by the barrister who, in even and impartial tones, was reciting the details of a savage but not ignoble crime. The Sailor was thousands of miles away in the Pacific; the groves of the Island of San Pedro were rising through the morning mists; he could hear the plop-plop of the sharks in the water; he could hear the Old Man coming up on deck.
"That man looks capable of anything," whispered Edward Ambrose.
The Sailor had always been clear upon that point. There was the drive to the docks in a cab through the rain of the November night in his mind. Again he was a helpless waif of the streets seated opposite Jack the Ripper. He almost wanted to scream.