Father was the next witness, and when he came back again he really tried to insist that we should go home. But, for the first time in my life, I stood out against him. I said I could not go until I knew at least what was going to become of Johnny Montgomery. Father gave me such a strange look, neither angry nor sad—something which I did not at all understand. He didn't urge me further, he hardly looked at me, but I was conscious of his set profile while I listened to a disagreement between Mr. Dingley's associate and Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson waved his arms a good deal, but the little man kept saying, "I insist, your Honor!" And finally the judge seemed to decide it in a way that pleased Mr. Dingley's man; though Mr. Dingley himself seemed not to be interested, paying no attention at all to the little man, who kept leaning over and speaking excitedly to him, and the court crier was calling for "Latovier."
A pale, indefinite-looking creature rose up from somewhere out of the crowd and shuffled slowly toward the witness-box. "There he is," I heard the whispers around me. "Why, don't you know? That's the man who was shipped off. They only got him back yesterday. He's supposed to know—"
I felt in my heart that something decisive was coming, and I had a premonition it was going to be something bad; the man appeared so wretchedly nervous as he sat there in the witness-box. He kept glancing at Johnny Montgomery, shuffling his feet and shifting his hat from hand to hand and what they got out of him came not at all as a story, but only with very many questions.
It seemed he had a little gunsmith's shop, not very well known, to which, he admitted, gentlemen such as the prisoner there, hardly ever came. But he said that on a certain night, perhaps two months ago, the prisoner and another man had come into the shop and looked a long time and bargained for the very best pistol he had in the place. It was a mother-of-pearl handle, he said, with trimmings of steel, and quite small. He had told them that it was hardly the weapon for a man to carry, and Johnny Montgomery had answered him that he did not mean to carry it long.
At this there was quite an uproar in the court, the lawyers shouting, the clerk trying to call order, and a great commotion in the press about the door. But I do not remember being afraid, only the inconvenience of having father keep his arm around my shoulders while I was trying to see how Johnny Montgomery looked. Finally quiet was restored, and then the man who had gone into the gunsmith's with Johnny testified; and after another pause, with all my expectations strained to tighter pitch than I could bear, came the general uprising which meant the court dismissed, that it was noon.
Father, looking down at me, said, "Now what do you propose to do? Are you going home with me?"
"Please," I said, "do this one thing for me. I have done everything you have wished so far. I can not endure not to know the worst or the best that can happen. I must hear the end. Let us come back here again this afternoon."
I was so excited that I didn't care what father thought of me. But all he said was, "Well!" And, "Then we will go over to the restaurant across the street for luncheon instead of going home."
It was a help not to have to step out of the excitement of the proceedings. It was that which kept me up, which carried me along. "There she is; that's the girl who saw it!" The voices whispering behind me gave me a sad stir of feeling, but it was better than being left to think. It spurred me; and the clatter of dishes and the crowd which filled the restaurant, talking all at once, yet with no distinct words audible, all helped to bridge over the chasm of the waiting. I could see Laura Burnet sitting at a near table with her thick veil raised only a little above her nose, just enough to let her drink a cup of tea. Some of father's friends and one or two of the young men I knew stopped at our table to shake hands, but very little was said, and of the trial nothing at all. For all their trying to be easy and natural, I could see that my presence embarrassed them. I could see them glancing at me as if they wondered what sort of person I could be—as though I had become something different from a girl by answering questions in the witness-box. By two o'clock we were back in court again; and how changed everything seemed! All that desultory feeling of the morning was gone, and as I looked about over the faces I could see how every one's mind was fixed on the same thing. A woman whom I did not know, jostling at my shoulder as I went in, confided to me that what she wanted was, "To hear Dingley tear the defense to pieces." I wondered if the only people in the room who didn't want to hear that were myself and the Spanish Woman.
But it was Mr. Jackson who got up first. Though I had heard all the evidence that morning it had come out in such little bits and patches with such disagreements of lawyers between, and I had myself been so in the midst of it that I had no idea as to how it would sum up; and I had been waiting anxiously to hear what this man, whom father said was such a fine lawyer, would say.