The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

So Jeffrey had pieced together his fragments of fact and deduction. So he had watched and discovered and reasoned and debated with himself. He had not, of course, said a word of these things to any one. The result was that, while he listened to the plans which his lawyer, young Emmet Dardis, laid for his defence––plans which, in the face of the incontestable facts which would be brought against them, would certainly amount to little or nothing––he really paid little attention to them. For, out of his reasoning and out of the things his heart felt, he had built up around himself an inner citadel, as it were, of defence which no attack could shake. He had come to feel, had made himself feel, that his life and his name were absolutely safe in the keeping of these two people––the one a girl who loved him and who would give her life for him, and the other a true friend, a man of God, a true man. He had nothing to fear. When the time came these two would speak. It was true that he was outwardly depressed by the concise and bitter conviction in the words of the prosecuting attorney. For Lemuel Squires was of the character that makes the most terrible of criminal prosecutors––an 225 honest, narrow man who was always absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused from the moment that a charge had been made. But inwardly he had no fear.

The weight of evidence that would be brought against him, the fact that his own best friends would be obliged to give their oaths against him, the very feeling of being accused and of having to scheme and plan to prove his innocence to a world that––except here and there––cared not a whit whether he was innocent or guilty, all these things bowed his head and brought his eyes down to the floor. But they could not touch that inner wall that he had built around himself. Ruth knew; the Bishop knew.

The rasping speech of the prosecutor was finished at last.

Old Erskine Beasley was the first witness called.

The prosecuting attorney took him sharply in hand at once for though he had been called as a witness for the prosecution it was well known that he was unwilling to testify at all. So the attorney had made no attempt to school him beforehand, and he was determined now to allow him to give only direct answers to the questions put to him.

Two or three times the old man attempted to explain, at the end of an answer, just why he had gone up into the high hills the night before the twentieth of August––that he had heard that 226 Rogers and a band of men had gone into the woods to start fires. But he was ordered to stop, and these parts of his answers were kept out of the record. Finally he was rebuked savagely by the Judge and ordered to confine himself to answering the lawyer’s questions, on pain of being arrested for contempt. It was a high-handed proceeding that showed the temper and the intention of the Judge and a stir of protest ran around the courtroom. But old Erskine Beasley was quelled. He gave only the answers that the prosecutor forced from him.

“Did you hear a shot fired?” he was asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear two shots fired?”

“No.”