The closing of the inquest upon the body of Jacob Van Deust was a mere formality. It was generally understood that there was within reach, if not in actual possession, some evidence that would go far to connect Dorn Hackett with the crime, and Squire Bodley even hinted as much in a few remarks that he made to the jury; but it was deemed injudicious to make it known at this juncture, and the jury, by the Squire's direction, returned a verdict of "death by violence at the hands of some person unknown."
Mary Wallace, ignorant of the slow, serpentine, and deadly ways of the thing men amuse themselves by calling "justice," when the finding of the jury was told to her that night found it difficult to understand why Dorn should be kept in jail, when there seemed to be no evidence which the coroner's jury has found sufficient to connect him with the crime.
"Uncle," said she, timidly approaching grim Mr. Thatcher, as he sat on the stone door-step, surrounded by a litter of fine shavings that he had scraped from a whale-lance handle that he was finishing by the last light of day, "why is it that, if the jury gave their verdict that the murder was done by some unknown person, they don't let Mr. Hackett out of jail?"
"Did you ever see a cat playing with a live mouse that she had caught?"
"Yes, uncle."
"How she lets it go a little way off, making it think it is going to escape, and then pounces on it again? How she pretends she isn't paying any attention to it, and has no notion of hurting it, and then suddenly tears it to pieces?"
"Yes, uncle," repeated Mary with a shudder.
"Well, that's the way the law does with a man."
Mary covered her face with her hands, and wept softly, while he went on:
"If they still hold on to Dorn Hackett, it is because they hope to get proof enough against him to make him out guilty. I have heard lawyers say that the law presumes every man to be innocent until he is proved guilty; and when I was a younger man, I actually believed that; but as I have got older, I have learned that practically, in the administration of the law, when a crime is committed somebody has got to suffer for it, for the sake of the moral effect on the community; and it don't really make much difference who it is, so long as the poor devil who is caught cannot prove himself innocent, which is sometimes a mighty hard thing to do. He may not be guilty, but they will try to make him out so. Better hang him than admit having made a blunder in his arrest."