More than the hush of appreciation at his first statement, more than the news of Whiting’s anger, his mother’s unexpected caress impressed upon him the seriousness of his position.
When he left the house, breakfast ended, he was fixed in his determination neither to get within reach of Cartwright, who was county attorney, nor to repeat his story. But once upon the street he found to his consternation that the story no longer needed his repetition. It traveled on every tongue, growing as it went. Nor was there lacking other evidence to support it. The examining physician shook his head over the shape and nature of the fatal wound; the helpers who had carried the man were swift to recollect his dying words. From somewhere there sprang the rumor of long-standing feud between Whiting and Charlie Morgan. Then it was no more a rumor but an established fact—time, place, and enhancing circumstances all known and repeated.
'Enough to hang anybody,' Grotend summed up the evidence, following with his coterie the trend of gossip. 'Only thing is, it’s funny the sort of people that do all the hearing and seeing.' He put his arm round Robbins’s shoulders. 'There’s Nelse here and Doc. Simpson—they’re all right; but look at the rest of 'em—If they said it was a nice day, I’d know it was raining. Take that Emerson fellow—'
'Well, if Nelse saw him on the side, I don’t see why Emerson couldn’t see him up on top; he must 'a' been there,' a listener protested. And Robbins, his throat constricted, drew out of hearing.
For the most part, however, he found a lively satisfaction in the increase of rumor. In such a mass of testimony, he reasoned, his own bit of spurious evidence was wholly unimportant. When that day and a second and still a third had passed with no demand upon him, his oppression vanished. Even the news of Whiting’s arrest did not greatly disturb him. There was now and then a minute of sick discomfort,—once when the truck-gardener attempted to hob-nob with him on the strength of their common information; once and more acutely when an overheard conversation warned him that the accused man was depending on an alibi,—but for the most part he put the danger of discovery resolutely out of his mind. Even should the alibi be forthcoming and his own story go thereby to the ground, 'They can’t be sure about it,' he comforted himself. 'They can’t know I didn’t—' Even in his thought he left the phrase unfinished.
It was the fourth day after Whiting’s arrest that, going toward home in the early evening, he heard his name spoken from behind, and turning, saw the county attorney. His first barely inhibited impulse was toward flight, but it was already too late for that. The elder man’s greeting detained him as by a hand upon his arm. He halted reluctantly, and they went on side by side.
The county attorney was a man in his early sixties—a tall stooping figure, gray-haired, with an habitual courtesy of manner which, more than irascibility, intimidated his younger neighbors. It was a part of his courtesy, now, to begin far-off from the subject at hand, in an effort, foredoomed to failure, to put his auditor at ease.
'I often watch you tall boys going past, and remind myself that I am getting old. I can remember most of you in your carriages. Indeed, with you, your father and I were law students together. And now you’re in high school, your mother tells me.' And with hardly a shift of tone, 'She tells me, too,—or rather my wife does,—that you were unfortunate enough to see Mr. Whiting on the day of poor Morgan’s death. I am sorry—'
'I—didn’t see him do anything,' Robbins protested. His tongue was suddenly thick and furry, and the words came with difficulty. 'Nothing I could swear to. He was just—there.'
He was staring straight ahead; he could not see how shrewd were the kindly eyes which measured him.