“We lived there contentedly, your Honour, a good father, a sainted mother, myself a grown boy, and—and a baby sister.... She had come late.... Perhaps that’s one reason we made so much of her. Just turned two she was, and a little bundle of winsomeness.... She gathered to herself all the glinting morning sunlight of the mountain tops.”
People stirred restlessly. This was not like Wallace. True, he sometimes indulged in sentiment before a jury and ofttime moved the sturdy yeomanry to free some red-handed rascal regardless of the facts. But to parade his own early rural days and his little sister—well, it only indicated that he was sore pressed.
But now the discerning could note the least little shade of resonance and purpose. And, too, he half turned from time to time toward the man in the dock.
“Through that valley the magnificent Blue Diamond Express went thundering by, bearing its burden of the prosperous and contented.... But then there were other trains, the long slow freights that wended their way, laden, down the valley. They, too, carried passengers ... on the couplings ... cramped up underneath ... or smuggled into the corner of a box car. These were of the underworld—the discontented and the disinherited. The tramp, the outcast ... perchance the criminal, making his getaway from city to city.”
He glanced keenly, quickly; his client was beginning to emerge from stolid indifference.
“The Old Grove Crossing, as they called it, was not so well guarded twenty years ago as now, your Honour. And one day this little two-year-old took it into her baby head to roam. Perhaps childish fancy paints the wild flowers on a distant hill brighter, perhaps some errant butterfly winged its random way across the tracks—who knows?
“At all events, the wanderlust seized her tiny feet and she had come just so near Montour County that she had but to cross the far track to have completely changed jurisdiction. And there she stood, for a big, slow-moving train of empties occupied that track. Puzzled? Perhaps a little; but still it was a matter of no moment.... Neither, your Honour, was the big, thundering Blue Diamond. Why should it be? There existed in all this world no such thing as either evil or fear.... And so she waited, transfixed only by wonderment as the monster thing bore down on her.... I’m aware, your Honour, that in every well-appointed melodrama the hero always appears at the proper instant.... But in real life sometimes—well, we have tried cases in our courts, the purpose of which was to determine the dollar value of that for which there can be no recompense—a baby life crushed out.”
He paused for an impressive second.
“And this was my baby sister.
“Oh, yes, they saw her ... when less than two hundred feet away. Along that straightaway the Montour Valley Railroad Company, in its corporate wisdom, shot its Blue Diamond seventy miles an hour. The engineer was the best man on the line—and he fainted dead away. That’s what their best man did. He had a baby of his own. Instinct made him throw on the brakes ... as well, a child’s bucket of sand on the tracks! ... Down, down it came, shrieking, crashing, pounding, and swirling from side to side; belching its hell of destruction and rasping its million sparks as the brakes half gripped.... Only one small mercy vouchsafed—by its awful might and momentum—instant death!”