“Quiet, Sherry!” Paul said, in a low tone, as the dog continued to growl and show his teeth.
In an instant Sherry was quiet and dropped his head between his paws. There was a brief consultation between judge and attorney, with the result that Sherry was permitted to remain as long as he behaved. He seemed to understand the decision, and, with one loud whack of his tail and one uplifting of his eyes to Paul, lay perfectly still while the trial progressed.
The first witness was the clerk at the Harbor Hotel, who had seen Jack when he came. The second, the clerk at the Beach Hotel, where Jack had spent the night. What their testimony had to do with the matter no one could tell. Miss Hansford mentally called the attorney a fool for intruding such matters. She was anxious to get on. So were the spectators, and when the clerks were dismissed they straightened up with new courage and waited for what was to come next. Those who had witnessed the quarrel and knockdown at the hotel were called, their testimony all leaning towards Paul, who, now that his name was used so often, began to listen to what was said and to live it all over again,—hearing Jack’s insulting words, feeling the heavy blow which felled him and involuntarily putting his hand to his side, which was not well yet from the force of Jack’s fist. The boy who had seen him on the sands and heard him say, “I’d like to kill him!” told a straightforward story and identified Paul as the man. The ladies who had been at the Percy cottage when Paul came there testified very unwillingly to the state of high excitement he was in when he left them to find Jack. Miss Hansford’s lodgers, who had been brought from Boston for the trial, took the stand one by one and told of seeing him and speaking to him as he passed the steps on which they were sitting twenty minutes or half an hour before the shot was fired. He was looking for Jack and had asked if they had seen him pass that way.
Up to this point, everything that Paul heard was strictly true and just as he remembered it. He would have sworn to it himself had they asked him to do so. But when Seth Walker, the man who had found the revolver with his initials upon it, came forward, he listened with a different interest, and as Seth described his meeting with Miss Hansford and her agitation as she demanded it of him and hid it under her apron, the confusion in his head increased and there was a buzzing in his brain like the sound of machinery in motion. Here was something he could not understand. The revolver was a mystery which he could not explain.
“It’s mine; but I have no idea how it came there in the woods,” he said, when it was shown to him, and, returning it to the attorney, he sank into his seat with a feeling that it was going hard with the poor wretch being tried for his life.
He was not the wretch. The buzzing in his head had separated him from that man for whom there was scarcely a ghost of a chance, and he began to pity him and to look around to see where he was. He could not find him, but his eyes fell upon Miss Hansford, who had relaxed from her stiff, upright position, and settled down in her chair until she was not much taller than Elithe, sitting beside her. Elithe had not moved perceptibly and might have been asleep, she was so motionless, until Paul said, “It is mine, but I have no idea how it came there in the woods.” Then she clutched at her veil, as if it smothered her. There was something in his voice so sad that her heart ached with a fresh pain and she used all her self-control not to cry out. Very gently, as we touch a sick, restless child, Miss Hansford put her hand on Elithe, who grew quiet again and resumed her former attitude.
It was expected that Miss Hansford would follow Seth Walker, who found the revolver, but it was growing late, and the judge thought it best to adjourn until the day following, when Miss Hansford and Elithe would be put upon the stand and with their testimony and that of the physicians called to attend Jack the prosecution would close. There had been some sharp cross-questioning for the defense, but it had failed to shake the evidence of the witness sworn, and not much had been accomplished either way. As the black mass of human beings surged out of the house, many murmurs of disappointment were heard. They had seen Paul and seen Elithe through her blue veil, but they wanted more than that,—wanted to see her on the stand, and Miss Hansford, too. This would come to-morrow, and, with this to anticipate, they went their different ways, talking of nothing but the trial and the seeming impossibility that Paul could be cleared. He was driven back to jail in his father’s carriage, very quiet and thoughtful and a great deal mystified with all he had heard and seen. His brain was still affected by the pain in his forehead and the back of his neck, and he could not understand clearly what it was all about or why he was conducted to prison, with Max Allen in attendance, instead of that other man who had shot Jack Percy. His father noticed his peculiar state of mind and feared for his reason.
“Better so, perhaps, than something worse. They don’t hang crazy people, or send them to State’s prison, either,” he thought, and, with this grain of comfort, he bade Paul good-night.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE SECOND DAY OF THE TRIAL.
It was a kind Providence which kept Paul in his numb and dazed condition and made him eat the supper Mrs. Stevens brought him with a keen relish, and afterwards wrapped him in a sleep so profound that he did not waken until the jailer knocked at his door and told him his breakfast was waiting. He had fallen asleep the moment his head touched the pillow, his last thought a confused one of the man they were trying and in whose fate he was interested. He was not that man when he went to sleep; he was Paul Ralston, the people’s favorite,—Clarice Percy’s affianced husband, and, if he dreamed at all, it was of the bridal festivities, commenced on so gigantic a scale. When he awoke, refreshed by his long sleep, the pain was gone from his head, leaving him only a little dizzy, but with full knowledge of what lay before him and who he was.