The weeks crept by and, one after another, the Japanese steamers sailed without him; but in his mind, which was slowly losing its clearness, a new hope dawned each day. I began to dread the hours beside his bed. It was hard to listen to the plans for his work which, under the stress of mounting fever, often trailed off to incoherent muttering, and to watch the thin profile of his face showing an ever sharper line against the pillow; hard to follow the doctor to his car and hear his passionless, hopeless words; harder still to go back and face the crazily bright eyes of Babanchik and, in response to his questions, lie cheerfully and so extravagantly that it seemed that only a madman could believe.
Yet he believed. For, one morning, I found him ruling a sheet of paper on a lapboard—he had fumed until the nurse had given him his pen. The vertical lines cut unsteadily across the page, and at the top of the columns he had written:—
'Date.'—'Car Number.'—'Destination.'—'Cargo.'
'You see, my dear,' he explained eagerly, 'there will be a great deal of purely mechanical work, such as this, to be done, and much of it I can do beforehand. For I shall be too busy, in Tiflis, and I cannot expect an assistant at this time.'
On that day I did not go back to his room. The doctor’s words had been fewer than usual, and there are times when one does not lie.
But, before bedtime, seeing his light burning, I tiptoed in. He stared dully.
'You have been talking long—I fell asleep waiting. And I wanted you to tell your doctor that I am losing all patience. If he cannot make me well enough to go at once, I shall find some other way to go—without his help. Keeping me in a warm room, the rain shut out, while my boys are lying in trenches! When I could be counting cars—' His breath failed him and he closed his eyes. Only when I looked back at him, with my hand on the door-knob, did he finish the sentence—'for Russia.'
When again I saw him he was neither old nor feeble nor ill. By some untold magic he had become the undauntable Babanchik of twenty years ago. Only, his pongee suit had been very carefully pressed, and this, together with his unsmiling mouth, made him look strange—strange and a little forbidding, as if the way for which he had been searching was one with which we could have no concern. And, presently, one of the Japanese steamers was taking him back to Russia.
THEREare secrets which are never told, mysteries which are never revealed, and questions which are never answered, even nowadays, when the press and the police so vigorously supplement the public and private interest in everybody’s affairs. It is another evidence of the superior force of the natural human instincts to the mechanism of civilization, that in country villages or isolated garrisons, unpermeated by press or police, such phenomena are most rare. Yet even there they exist.
Fort Lawrence is a three-company post, possessing no neighbor, except a few scattered ranches, within a radius of several hundred miles. Thus thrown upon their own resources for amusement, the garrison’s knowledge of one another’s business is exhaustive, and events in these dull, peaceful days are picked as bare of detail as any bone acquired by some long-hungry dog. Yet at Lawrence occurred the following events, the inner relation of whose outward facts has never been fully understood.
A couple of years ago, Lawrence had been occupied for many months by three companies from the—— th Cavalry, though the chances of army promotion had recently brought it a commanding officer from another regiment. Major Pryor, a middle-aged man, who sheltered shyness behind a rampart of sternness, became immediately unpopular by tightening the reins of government, which his predecessor had held somewhat slackly. But the garrison and its feminine belongings were inclined to forgive him when they perceived that he had fallen seriously in lovewith Rosita. Now, nobody had ever considered Rosita seriously before; not even her father, old Lawless the post-trader, in regard to whom the suspicion that he was a rascal had been condoned by the certainty that he was the jolliest of companions.
Old Lawless maintained complete silence as to his past; and as Rosita’s mother formed part of that doubtful darkness when he, and his child, and his stock in trade installed themselves at Lawrence, he had never been heard to refer to her. That she had belonged to some mixed breed, part Spanish, part Indian, was, however, written on each feature of her daughter’s body and mind—if Rosita could be said to have a mind.
'Every woman, savage or civilized, will love some day to her own sorrow,' her father had declared, with a cynical laugh. 'But Rosita’s future is tolerably safe. Chocolate bonbons are her ruling passion, and as she has the digestion of an ostrich, many years will elapse before she is likely to suffer for her devotion!'
She was exceedingly pretty, with the beauty of bright eyes, lithe figure, and a complexion so transparent that the most enthusiastic admirer of fairness would not have wished her less dusky. Since she was fifteen she had held gay and undisputed sway among the younger officers; for Lawrence was so distant a post that feminine visitors were seldom seen there, and in those days the garrison families possessed only daughters in the nursery. The fame of her pretty looks and ways had become widespread among the frontier forts; yet it was noticeable that her admirers, while ransacking the realms of nature in eulogy of this gazelle, this kitten, this lark, never called her an angel, or even ascended high enough in the spiritual scale to compare her to a fairy, though there was nothing known of her at which the sternest army matron could take umbrage. She was asignorant of evil as any of the wild creatures with whose names she had been rebaptized, and Lawless kept a keen though seemingly careless eye upon her amusements.
With this girl Duncan Pryor did not flirt. Plain, prosaic, and forty, he loved her; while Rosita, instinctively discerning the difference between his behavior and that of her other admirers, appeared rather repelled than gratified—an attitude which became more obvious the more her father encouraged this serious suitor, and was presently explained, to the increasing interest of the spectators of the little drama, by the discovery that Rosita had developed another love than that for chocolates, and one which she concealed as slightly.
Gerald Breton, or 'Jerry,' as he was familiarly known, had, upon his first coming to Lawrence, devoted to Rosita’s society every moment which he could spare from military duties that were not numerous; but in so doing he only fulfilled the manifest destiny of all his compeers at the post. He was a big, fair young fellow, with jovial Irish blood in his veins, and a smile which was perhaps more eloquent than he knew. Certainly, when he returned from a two months' 'leave,' he announced his engagement to the most adorable of women, met and won during his absence, with a frank assurance of congratulation which bespoke a conscience void of reproach.
Neither did Rosita reproach him. She preferred him to his brethren in a manner flattering to masculine vanity. And Jerry, having placed the colors of hisfiancéein his helmet, did not hesitate to enjoy such amusement as was provided for him in a post that would have been dull without Rosita. She was comrade as charmingly as coquette. She rode hurdle-races, and shot at targets, and smoked cigarettes, as keenly as Jerry himself, while she could sing a love-song to her guitar, or dance to her castanets, witha grace and a fervor that no music-hall star of a much-regretted civilization could surpass.
How soon Jerry guessed what it was that looked at him from under her long lashes, which was absent when she bestowed her fearless glances upon the other officers, is not made quite plain to his conscience yet. But he was promptly aware of Major Pryor’s determination to prevent him from keeping engagements which brought him into the society of Rosita. No position of authority lends itself so readily to petty tyranny as that of a post-commander, when the incumbent is thus disposed; and that Pryor was thus disposed toward Lieutenant Breton, not only the victim, but Rosita particularly, and the garrison generally, quickly perceived. The adjutant, indeed, though a submissive person, ventured an occasional remonstrance concerning orders manifestly over-exacting, but won nothing by his presumption.
Was picnic or dinner arranged, at the last moment an orderly appeared, presenting the major’s compliments and a special detail which required Lieutenant Breton’s attention. When a much-talked-of fishing expedition, involving several nights' camping, was about to set forth, Jerry was appointed to the escort of some wagons just starting en route to the nearest river-town for supplies; while reproofs, irritably delivered and flagrantly undeserved, were a daily occurrence. Rosita’s wrath, the jocular condolences of his chums, and the no less evident though wordless sympathy of his superiors added fuel to the smouldering fire of Jerry’s resentment. Upon a certain radiant June afternoon this fire blazed.
A full-dress parade had been commanded, for the sole purpose, it was growled, of giving scope to the major’s restless energies. Some trifling fault in the demeanor of Jerry’s troop brought on him a scathing rebuke in thepresence of his men, of his comrades, and of the ladies who had gathered to watch such small display of military pomp as their position permitted. Temper conquered discipline. Instead of the silent salute which was his duty, Lieutenant Breton began an angry expostulation, and was sternly ordered to his quarters, under arrest for disrespect to the commanding officer.
Lawrence reveled in its sensation across that evening’s supper-tables. Pryor was right, of course: Jerry had been guilty of grave misbehavior before the whole garrison. Yet love of justice is strong, even in the strictest enforcer of discipline—when the enforcer is Anglo-Saxon. If Jerry should refuse to apologize, or if Pryor should refuse to be thus appeased, the two captains resolved that private statements of the case should go to Washington before further complications should arise for the victim of a personal prejudice.
Jerry, however, in the solitary confinement of his own sitting-room, knew nothing of these plans, and faced a gloomy future through an infuriating present. Dear as his career was to him, he determined to sacrifice it rather than apologize to a man who, whatever his rank, was egregiously wrong. But even if his resignation were accepted under the circumstances of his breach of discipline, and he escaped court-martial, how could he justify to his home people the enmity of his commanding officer? Only by a story regarding its cause which he should feel himself a cad in the telling. And would his proud sweetheart accept the allegiance of the hero of such a story as unstained and unshaken?
When his wrath had cooled and his solitude remained undisturbed, Jerry began to feel forsaken as well as ill used. Tired of the perpetual turning which pacing his tiny quarters involved, he dropped disconsolately into a chair, and covered his face with his hands.
There was a rustle of petticoats, and, with dismayed assurance, he lifted his head. Yes, it was she, the pretty cause of his troubles, gazing at him with eyes that glowed through tears.
'Rosita!' he muttered, in a tone instinctively lowered, even in his surprise, for the sentry posted outside his door was probably within hearing. 'How did you get here?'
'By that window,' she answered, her white teeth gleaming as she nodded toward an open window that looked upon a rear veranda—a veranda which extended the length of 'officers' row,' where the post-trader had rented an unused set of quarters.
Suddenly she sank to her knees beside his chair, clasping both hands over one of his.
'He is a wicked man!' she cried passionately. 'I hate him!'
Jerry rose hurriedly, lifting her as he did so.
'Speak lower. You should not have come,' he said.
'Why shouldn’t I come?' Rosita faltered, tears on her long lashes, her lips quivering like a child’s. 'You are alone and in trouble.'
'Beastly trouble! It is awfully kind of you. By Jove!' he exclaimed, his outraged sense of propriety yielding place to a yet more wounded sense of his friends' desertion in this time of need; 'you are the only one of the lot who cares what happens to any fellow after he is down.'
'It isn’t "any fellow." I care for you, Jerry,' she murmured wistfully. 'But he cannot hurt you, really? Just for to-night?'
'To-night!' he repeated, while discretion fled the field, routed by the rush of a vision of the probable consequences of his wrongs which swept over his soul. 'He intends to destroy my whole career. And he will do it, too, for I shall never apologize to him!'
Sympathy is none the less sweet when it shines in brilliant eyes, and he was not much more than a boy—a boy aghast in the presence of his first trouble. He grew eloquent while he described the gloomy future which Pryor’s tyranny stretched before him.
'The long and short of it is that I am ruined through his confounded jealousy'—
He broke off his peroration abruptly, coloring hotly.
'You shall not be ruined! It is for my sake he hates you! But I will save you!' she panted.
'Nonsense!' he exclaimed, half touched, half anxious. 'You cannot get rid of Pryor; and as I cannot remain under his command without apology, I must resign—which will mean ruin for me,' he ended, with almost a groan of despondency.
She caught his hand, and pressed it to her breast, to her lips.
'Wait! Trust me!' she cried, running to the open window. 'He shall do you no more harm!'
Jerry, his pulses thrilling to those trembling kisses, followed her.
'Rosita! Sweetest—truest'—he gasped, 'you must not interfere! This matter concerns only Pryor and me. I forbid you!'
She turned when she had crossed the low ledge, and flashed a smile back to him—a smile which both bewildered and repelled him.
'You shall forbid me anything—except to serve you,' she said, and vanished among the shadows of the veranda.
For an instant he meditated pursuit, but gave it up as he remembered the complications which would ensue should he be seen in apparent attempt to evade his arrest.
Rosita was a dear little ignoramus, embarrassingly fond of him, he told himself, grasping at his usual common sense,which was perplexed by vague alarm. Yet surely she could intend nothing more than to make a pretty scene as special pleader for his cause with Pryor—a pleader who, unless that officer had utterly lost dignity, would produce no other effect than to embitter the jealousy which was the foundation of this persecution.
Fort Lawrence goes to bed early. By eleven o’clock sleep apparently possessed the garrison, with the exception of the widely scattered sentinels who cried the hour. But the clear calls had scarcely died upon the vast surrounding stillness of the prairie night when they were succeeded by the sharp, unmistakable report of a pistol-shot.
Jerry Breton, lounging, half-awake, beside the veranda window of his sitting-room, was roused to full consciousness and a pang of foreboding.
The report came from a path which skirted the rampart immediately beneath the veranda, at a point where the bluff beyond descended so abruptly into the Yellowstone River, hundreds of feet below, that the sentry rarely patrolled it, ingress or egress being impossible to any one in a sane mood. Jerry sprang down the veranda steps, assuring himself that there might be a dozen comparatively harmless reasons for the shot, and that his terror was merely nightmare. Yet when he beheld the body of a man prostrate, face forward, across the path, he knew him, with a knowledge that anticipated sight. Shrinkingly he bent over him, uttered a half-strangled cry, which was dismayed, not surprised, and picked up a pistol, a tiny silver-mounted toy, horribly incongruous beside that ghastly, motionless figure—a dainty, deadly thing that Jerry had given months before to the 'best markswoman in the Northwest.'
There was a swift rush of footsteps from various directions: the sentry to whose beat this stretch of rampart belonged,another sentry from his station before the door of Jerry’s quarters, and three or four partly clad officers roused out of their slumbers.
Jerry stood upright—a slight, erect figure, whose silhouette was distinct against the blue moonlit sky. He swung his arm above his head, and flung the pistol far over the edge of the bluff.
The next instant he was surrounded by a crowd; a tumult of exclamation and question arose, as Pryor’s inanimate body was recognized, and carefully examined for some sign of life. In the midst of the tumult he leaned against the rampart, neither speaking nor apparently hearing, until Blount, the captain of his troop, laid an admonitory hand on his shoulder.
'You were here first—Don’t stare like an idiot! Tell us what you saw.'
'Is he dead?'
'We cannot be sure until the surgeon comes. Did you see any one?'
Jerry shuddered visibly.
'I saw nobody!'
'The major has been queer lately, poor chap. Perhaps he shot himself,' Blount suggested eagerly.
'Was not that a pistol you threw away?' another officer asked sharply.
Jerry lifted his eyes. Those familiar faces were pale and stern.
'You saw'—he faltered.
'Speak, lad!' Blount entreated.
'I cannot talk. I must have time to think.'
'The truth doesn’t need thinking. It requires plain telling.'
There ensued a silence, through which creaked the hurried approach of the surgeon’s boots.
Jerry’s fair head drooped; he caught uncertainly at Blount’s arm.
'I have nothing to say,' he muttered faintly.
Blount, who, as senior captain, succeeded to Pryor’s command in case of that officer’s death or incapacity, turned from his young subordinate.
'Sergeant Jackson,' he said, in a voice that was not quite steady, 'take Lieutenant Breton to his quarters. You will be responsible for him until further instructions.' Then he knelt beside Pryor, over whom the surgeon was bending. 'Is there life in him?' he asked.
There was life in him—life that lingered after they had carried him to his bed and his wound had been dressed; a mere spark of life, which might flicker out at any moment, although, the major being a healthy man, in the prime of years, it might yet blaze up again into strength. Such was the surgeon’s unchanging report during the next two days to the post, where horror of the tragedy in its midst had silenced gossip, and where even conjecture held its breath.
There is thus much resemblance between a small garrison and a family, that the befalling of a calamity to one of their number softens all judgments; quarrels, criticisms, envyings, are the corrupted fruit of a too brilliant sunshine. Pryor had been unpopular, but only kindness was spoken of him now that it seemed probable that he lay dying. If there was a manifest desire, especially among the ladies, to foster a suspicion that his evident wretchedness had led him to attempt suicide, the desire merely expressed their hope that Jerry Breton’s innocence might be proved, in spite of the young fellow’s stunned passiveness and his strange flinging away of the pistol.
Proof either of guilt or of innocence depended vitally on Pryor’s recovery, as no inquiry had elicited any of thefacts which preceded the catastrophe of that night. Shortly after ten o’clock the commanding officer had passed the sentry for a solitary stroll along the rampart, which was a daily habit with him; nobody else had been seen, and nothing unusual had been heard until the pistol-shot.
Depression, black as the shadow of death which over-hung them, possessed the little post which was wont to be so cheery. No one was surprised to hear that Rosita had been added to the number of the surgeon’s patients, nor did any one doubt the cause of the nervous collapse from which he declared her to be suffering, and which forced him to veto Mrs. Blount’s offer of a visit to her. Lawless, he said, had miraculously developed into the most perfect of nurses, and Rosita, with the tendency to delirium that belongs to volatile and undisciplined temperaments, was better off under his undisturbed attendance.
Closely confined to his quarters, Jerry Breton knew nothing of her illness, and each hour of her silence, after he believed that she must be aware of his position, buried deeper his hope that she would confess when she discovered that he had assumed the suspicion of her mad crime. With bitterness he reflected that the devotion of so fantastic a creature was no more to be trusted than her moral principles; and bound though he felt himself to shelter her, he yearned for the happiness and honor she alone could restore to him.
Whether Pryor lived or died, his own career must end in a darkness whose varying degrees seemed to Jerry scarcely worth remark. This story of treacherous vengeance would be told to his own people, and to the woman he loved. Oh, God! How his soul adored her purity, her pride, the girlish exaltation for which he had used to profess a tender ridicule! Had he been cruelly unjust to her, and to those others who were dear to him? Yet would he not have beenunutterably base had he crawled to safety across the condemnation of Rosita, whose crime had resulted from misguided love for him?
Like most of his compeers, Jerry had a character which was one of action rather than of thought. In the sleepless thought of those forty-eight hours his boyishness slipped from him forever, and he attained the full stature of his manhood—God help us!—as most of humanity does so attain in the forcing-house of suffering!
Twilight had come the second time when Captain Blount knocked at the door of Jerry’s quarters.
'I think the lieutenant is asleep—and it’s the first rest he has had, sir'—Jackson hesitated.
'I’ve news for him that he will like better than sleeping! His arrest is over!' Blount cried, entering.
Jerry lay back, unawakened, in the only armchair the unluxurious room possessed. Blount stared down at the haggard young face, with a blending of affection and resentment which made a very complete perplexity. Not until he touched the sleeper’s shoulder did the heavy lids lift slowly.
'I’ve nothing to say,' Jerry murmured half consciously.
'I am sure of it, you donkey! Pryor, however, has said something, and the whole crowd of us must beg your pardon, though you have yourself to blame that we suspected you.'
'Pryor has spoken? What does he say?'
'The surgeon will not let him talk; but he insisted on hearing who was accused, and he acquitted you at once. Now I want you to tell me what confounded quixotism kept you silent, at such cost, if, as seems probable from his despondency, he attempted his own life.'
Jerry frowned, and looked away into the gathering shadows.
'Despondent is he, poor chap?' he asked presently.
'Even less thankful to be alive than you seem to be free again.'
Jerry sat upright, his pale face flushing, his eyes shining.
'I? Not thankful?' he cried in a voice shaken to the verge of an utter breakdown. 'I have been in hell these two days, and you have brought me out—but—but—go away, Blount, or I shall make a fool of myself!'
Lieutenant Breton was breakfasting late the next morning, when Pryor’s orderly appeared with an immediate summons to the commanding officer’s presence. War, armedcap-à-pie, sprang into existence in Jerry’s heart at this summons. He had proved Pryor capable of tyranny without reason, and could not hope, when the spirit of such a man had been as cruelly wounded as his body, that he would incline to mercy. But in the blessedness of his own safety he forgave Rosita her silence, and, while aware of the perplexities that would beset him, he vowed that no admission of her guilt should be extorted from him.
There was, however, neither wrath nor challenge in the hollow eyes which confronted him when he stood beside Pryor’s bed, and a gaunt hand feebly moved across the counterpane toward him.
'You are a fine fellow, Breton,' the major murmured. 'I beg your pardon!'
Jerry dumbly clasped the quivering fingers.
'They have told me that you flung a pistol over the bluffs,' Pryor continued slowly. 'Of course I know whose pistol it was. But I wish you to understand that the shooting was my fault, like the whole affair. I provoked her with words I had no right to speak; I denied her the mere justice she demanded. Except for your courage I should have brought disgrace upon her, as I have brought death.'
'Death? Rosita?'
'She died last night.'
Jerry dropped into a chair. Death! Rosita!—a creature so instinct with the life of this world that it was impossible to conceive her in the life of which death is the portal.
'Did she—' He shuddered.
'No! She never rallied from the shock of that night. Her father has been here to ask me to forgive the dead. My God! I shall not forgive myself!' Pryor cried, with an anguish none the less intense for the faintness of the voice which uttered it.
Jerry had covered his face, and the other stared enviously at the tears that slipped through his fingers.
'Time is up!' the surgeon exclaimed from outside the closed door.
The eyes of the two men met wistfully.
'I have deserved no favor from you,' Pryor muttered; 'neither is it for my sake that I entreat you to continue silent. There will be no further inquiry into the matter, as the surgeon tells me that I shall recover. So the garrison must be satisfied only with conjecture as to my temporary madness and your magnanimity.'
'It is you who are magnanimous!'
'I loved her; I persecuted her! The death she desired for me was mercy compared to the life which is all the atonement I can make to her memory.'
With which exceeding bitter whisper Pryor turned himself to the wall.
Out on the parade, the radiant freshness of the prairie morning thrilled Jerry’s young veins with an ecstasy of living, and a sharp pang of compassion stabbed his heart.
Misguided, bewitching,—ah, yes, and loving,—Rosita lay dead in the midst of the summer gladness that seemed akin to her. He pulled his cap over his eyes, and, ignoringsome cordial greetings, walked hurriedly to the post-trader’s quarters. Presently Lawless came to him in the little drawing-room, which was unfamiliarly dark and still.
'God bless you!' he said, laying a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. 'Those words do not mean much to me. I’ve wished they did since last night. But you will understand from them that I am grateful. Hush! I have nothing to forgive you. Nor had she. Will you come to see her? She never knew that you were shielding her, or she would have confessed; and she wished you to see her—if she looked pretty.'
Pretty, indeed! Poor flower of a people Christianized just enough to suffer for the savage instincts they do not learn to control! She lay with a crucifix between the hands which seemed so childish, and were so guilty.
'Remember her like this,' Lawless continued. Remember, too, that she loved you; not as the women of our race love, when nature is subdued by civilization and ruled by religion, but with the limitless love of a squaw for her chief, knowing neither right nor wrong in her devotion to him. For under her daintiness and her sweetness Rosita was a squaw.'
Across her grave three men kept silence. There is another regiment at Lawrence now, and when the ——th Cavalry remember what they beheld of this story, they glance at their quiet major with wonder for his fleeting madness. Only the surgeon and one or two ladies murmur to their own thoughts, 'Rosita?'
ITbegan with no more than a word, such as a man might speak and forget he had spoken. At the time of speaking, Robbins Nelson was standing with a group of other youths—lads in their late 'teens and early twenties—on the Sutro Station platform. All their eyes were on the approaching train, and all their tongues were busy with a single topic.
Robbins was the youngest member of the group—barely turned sixteen. Usually he hung somewhat unregarded on its edge, but to-day, bold in the possession of first-hand knowledge, he thrust himself into the heart of the talk.
'I looked right down on him, close as I am to you. I was walking along over that cut where the train comes through. Gee, his head looked three-cornered! I yelled, but the engineer didn’t know what I meant. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have stopped—nothing but a hobo.'
'No good if they had,' an older speaker took up the words. 'He was done for. Didn’t speak but once after they got him off. "Don’t hit me," he says. I s’pose when they run into the tunnel and whatever it was jammed into him—'
'He didn’t get hurt in any tunnel,' Robbins asserted. The color flared into his face with the intensity of his conviction. The horrid memory of the man set him to blinking. 'He couldn’t get hurt if he was lying down, could he? And if he was standing up, it’d knock him off, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t any tunnel—'
He broke off, aware suddenly of the smiling ridicule in the faces round him. Grotend, brother-in-law to the coroner who had held the inquest, laughed good-temperedly.
'Go it, William J. Burns, Junior! I s’pose some fancy murderer crawled up on top between stations. Or he got jolted down out of an air-ship. It’d take something like that—'
Grotend was popular with the group. Their ready laughter rewarded the attack. And the younger boy’s crimson misery was an invitation to further teasing.
'You hadn’t ought to be stingy with bright ideas like that, Nelse. He sent you an anonymous letter, didn’t he? Or maybe you saw a man in a black mask beating him up—'
'No, I didn’t!' said Robbins loudly. He cast about desperately in his mind for a means of escape. 'I didn’t see anybody beating him up, but I saw Jim Whiting coming down off the end of the car.'
A hush followed his statement—a tribute to the weight of it. Grotend, his lips parted for a fresh jibe, drew in his breath sharply as though in the shock of a cold douche. Then,—
'You saw Jim Whiting?' he reiterated.
Jim Whiting was brakeman on the local freight, a figure familiar enough to all of them.
'Getting deaf, aren’t you?' Robbins retorted.
He turned his back upon his tormentors and walked away across the platform.
He was not much impressed with the importance of his lie. Chiefly, he was elated that there had come to him a lie suitable to turn the tables. Half-way home his elation lasted, to be crowded out only by the recurring memory of the injured tramp. The boy had never before seen violent death. The picture of the man as he sped past, bloody andmisshapen, on the swaying car-top; the later picture of him borne up the street on the improvised stretcher, came back upon him hideously. That for such destruction, for such wanton suffering, there should be no punishable agent, seemed intolerable. And the idea once presented, who so likely as Whiting—
He heard the beat of footsteps behind him, and Grotend, breathing quickly, swung into pace at his side.
'I been trying to catch up with you,' he explained unnecessarily. 'Say, when Jim come out on the platform, I spoke to him. I says, "One of the fellows says he saw you up on top that day the tramp got hurt." And you’d ought to seen him. I guess he knew—'
'What’d he say?' Robbins interrupted.
'All he says was, "You tell that fellow he’s a liar"; but if you’d seen the look on him—,'
'Don’t you tell him I said it,' the younger boy cautioned. 'I don’t want him down on me.' A belated stir of conscience set him to hedging. 'Anyhow, I didn’t say I saw him up on the car. All I saw was when he was just there on those iron steps on the side. I don’t know if he was going up or down.'
They stood at the Nelson gate for a little, talking. It was full dark when Robbins went up the shrub-lined path to the porch. In the lighted dining-room his mother and the younger children were already at supper.
'Late, Robbins,' Mrs. Nelson admonished as he slid into his place. Then, catching sight of his face, 'Tired out? If it’s that accident that’s worrying you—'
'It’s not,' the boy denied. He felt his cheeks grow hot with a sudden flush of annoyance. 'I don’t see what I’d worry about that for. Only, Charlie Grotend told Mr. Whiting I saw him on the car that day, and it made Whiting mad. I was wishing he hadn’t.'
'You didn’t say anything more than that—that he could have helped it, or anything like that? Well, then!' She put the discussion aside with a gesture. 'Merle Williams telephoned to see if you’d come over there to-night. You might as well. There’s no use brooding—'
'I’mnot!' Robbins flung back angrily.
His spirits lightened somewhat in the process of dressing for his outing. They lightened still more when, on his way to the place of entertainment, he came up with three or four of his mates similarly bound, and went on with them, easily the hero of the little group. Sutro, though a county seat, was a place of few excitements. The finding of the injured tramp, his death, the inquest, which had been held that day, were topics of surpassing interest, and Robbins, by virtue of his momentary contact, found his importance measurably enhanced. Before the evening was over, he had told his story a half-dozen times, each time with less repulsion, with a keener sense of its dramatic value.
'I was walking along the cut—you know, there where the train goes under you—and I saw him and yelled at the engineer to stop. I thought he was dead already—he looked like it. I don’t know what I yelled for, only I thought he’d roll off. No, I didn’t say I saw Whiting up on top,—' He adhered scrupulously to the form of his first telling,—'I saw him on those steps on the side. I’d called to him, too, if I’d seen him in time, but I didn’t.'
'I bet he’d have understood,' suggested one of the listeners.
There was something cynical, something appalling, in the fashion in which their untempered youth seized upon the idea of guilt as the concomitant of injury. Robbins, tramping home a half-hour after midnight, felt all round him the concurrence of his mates—a warm supporting wave. He was committed beyond retreat now to his theory. Almosthe was self-deceived. Visualizing the scene, he could scarcely have said whether, actually, he saw Whiting’s big body flattened against the side of the car, or whether he himself had superimposed the detail.
He slept late next morning, and emerging, discovered his mother, red-eyed, moving restlessly between kitchen and dining-room. She called to him as he came out, but it was not until he was seated before his oven-dried breakfast that, with a long breath, as though she braced herself,—
'Mrs. Cartwright was here this morning,' she observed.
The words were indifferent, but the tone was so full of significance that instinctively the boy stopped eating to listen.
'She’d been sitting up last night with Mrs. Morgan. Robbins, that boy—that poor boy—wasn’t a tramp at all. He was Charlie Morgan, trying to beat his way back home.'
'How’d they know?' Robbins asked.
'Something about the body. There was some mark. It’s dreadful for his mother. And it’s worse because she thinks—Mrs. Cartwright says a good many people think—it wasn’t an accident at all. The wound don’t look like it. And then your seeing Mr. Whiting—'
'What’d you tell her that for?' Robbins muttered.
He pushed back his chair, his hunger vanished as if from feasting.
'I didn’t. She told me. She says that man who has the truck-garden—Emerson, isn’t it?—is saying he saw Mr. Whiting on the car-roof and recognized him. But, of course, a man like that—'
Her tone disposed effectually of the second witness. She got to her feet and began to gather up the dishes from the table.
'Mrs. Cartwright says Mr. Cartwright’s looking into thething. In his position, he’d have to. I told her you’d go up to his office.' She was passing behind Robbins’s chair as she spoke. To his amazement, she stooped and laid her cheek for an instant against his shoulder. 'Don’t you let him worry you, Robbie. You just stick to your story,' she counseled.
'I’m not going near him,' Robbins declared defiantly.
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 whyEmerson 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 myselfthat 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.
'Timid,' the lawyer was labeling his witness. 'Sensitive. Over-scrupulous. He’d scruple his testimony out of existence.'
Aloud he spoke with grave reassurance. 'Your merely seeing Mr. Whiting can do him no harm. Indeed, you may not be needed at all. The preliminary examination having been waived—' He paused for a moment before the Nelson gate, his thin-featured old face remote and serious. 'In any case, remember this, my boy. Nothing is ever required of you on the witness stand except to tell your story exactly as you have told it off the stand. In the end the truth will come out and no innocent man be harmed.'
He congratulated himself as he went on up the street that he had reassured the lad, put before him his irresponsibility in its true light. Had he looked back, he might have seen the reassured witness staring after him in a kind of horror of amazement. To Robbins it was as if, astoundingly, an outsider had voiced the thought of his own heart. That truth must prevail, that false witnesses would be brought to confusion—it was a belief ingrained into thefibre of his being. He was sick with a premonition of disgrace.
'Only, they can’tknow,' he tried to hearten himself. 'I can stick to it I did.' He stood still a moment, the line of his sensitive chin grown suddenly hard. 'And I’ve got to stick to it,' he warned himself. 'I’ve got to stick it out as long as I live.'
It did not need the county attorney’s advice to keep him away from the court-room during the opening days of the trial. With all the youthful masculinity of Sutro crowding the courthouse steps, Robbins sat at home in the hot, darkened parlor, reading from books pulled down at random, seeing always, no matter what he read, a room set thick with eyes—eyes scornful, eyes reproachful, eyes speculative.
When at last the ordeal came, it was so much less dreadful than his anticipation of it that he was conscious of an immediate relief. There was, indeed, a minute of blind confusion as he made his way toward the stand—voices singing in his ears, a blue mist before his eyes. Then, somehow, he was sworn and seated, and all round him were the friendly faces of neighbors. He could see the judge nod encouragement to him over his desk; he could see the bracing kindness of the county attorney’s glance. Whiting he could not see, the bowed shoulders of a reporter intervening.
He was scarcely nervous after the first moments. His story flowed from him without effort, almost without volition. 'I was walking along the track—I’d been fishing—' It seemed to him that he had said the words a million times.
There were interruptions now and then; objections; questions from a round-faced, deep-voiced youngster, who, Robbins divined presently, was Whiting’s lawyer; but all of it—the narrative, the pauses, the replies—came with theregular, effortless movement of well-oiled machinery. He could have laughed at the puerile efforts of the defense to break down his story.—'Was he sure that he knew James Whiting?' Was there a resident of Sutro who did not know him? 'Could he swear,—taking thought that he was under oath,—could heswearthat the man on the side of the car was James Whiting and not some other man resembling him? If, on a moving train, another man resembling James Whiting, of about James Whiting’s size—'
'He knows he can’t touch me,' Robbins was thinking triumphantly. 'He knows it!'
The question of truth or falsehood was quite removed from him now. He came down from the stand finely elated, and in the afternoon went back of his own accord to the court-room. Emerson, the truck-gardener, was under examination and faring badly. One by one, the damaging facts of his past came out against him—an arrest for theft, a jail sentence for vagrancy, a quarrel with the prisoner, proved threats. The victim emerged limp from the ordeal, and slunk away from the room, wholly discredited.
'Serves him right, though,' Robbins quenched his momentary pity. 'I knew all the time he was lying.' He started suddenly, so violently that the listener seated next him turned in irritation. 'And,' it had flashed through his mind, 'and he knew I was!'
His eyes sought the prisoner—the man who also knew—where he sat hunched heavily forward in his chair, his arms upon the table. For an instant, pity, like some racking physical pain, shot through Robbins. To be caught in such a web! To be caught through no fault of his own! It was the first time the purely personal side had broken its way past his own selfish concern. It stifled him and, forcing his eyes from the man’s brooding face, he got up and stumbled out of the room.
But he could not stay out. An indefinite dread dragged him back presently. An indefinite dread held him bound to his place during the examination of the witnesses who followed, during the days of argument, and the judge’s inconclusive charge. He lay awake on the night following the jury’s retirement, picturing over and over in his own mind the scene of their return—just what degree of astonishment his face should show in listening to their verdict, with just what proud reticence and conscious wrong he should make his way out from the crowd. He had never said that Whiting was guilty—he reminded himself of that. All he had ever said was that on one certain day, in one certain place— He rolled over on his face and, hands across his eyes, tried vainly to sleep.
Half of Sutro was loafing about the court-house lawn next morning, pushing its way into the corridors at every rumor, drifting back to the freer outer air. When at last the rumor proved a true one, Robbins found himself far in the back of the room, the wall behind him, on three sides a packed, jostling crowd. There was a blur of unintentional noise in the place—heavy breathing, the creaking of a door. Through the noise pierced at intervals the accustomed voice of the judge, and set between the intervals the mumble of the foreman’s reply.
'—Agreed, all of you?'
'Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?'
The mumble dropped lower still. A stir swept over the front of the room, a wave of voiceless interest passing from front to back.
'What—what—' Robbins stammered, straining higher on tiptoe.
'Guilty. Manslaughter,' said the man beside him. He brought his hand down heavily on the boy’s shoulder. 'Suits you all right. Everybody knew—'
The gavel sounded and he broke off, bending forward to listen.
But Robbins did not listen. It was as though the foundations of his world crumbled round him. That truth should fail, that innocent men should suffer— He fumbled at the sleeve of the man on the other side.
'I—didn’t hear. They said—'
'Sh-h!' the man warned him, and then, behind his sheltering hand, 'Guilty.'
The judge’s voice dropped, and the speaker began moving with others toward the door. Robbins moved, too—as one dazed, uncertain what he did. Some one stopped him in the outer passage. He was conscious of congratulatory sentences. He heard his own voice speaking words which, seemingly, were not without meaning. And all the while his mind waited, awed, for the impending catastrophe.
Mercifully, the house was empty when he reached home. He tiptoed into his own room, and there, the door closed behind him, stood for a moment, listening. Then, with an exclamation, he dropped to his knees beside the bed and buried his face against it.
For an hour he knelt there, bodily quiet, his mind beating, circling, thrusting desperately against its surrounding cage of falsehood. At first it was all fear—how the exposure would come, how best he might sustain himself against it. Then, imperceptibly, a deeper terror crept into his thinking. Suppose it should not come? Suppose— But that was unthinkable. For a lie to blast a man’s whole life, for a lie to brand him. Stealthily, as if his very stirring might incense the devil-god of such a world, he slid down, sitting beside the bed, his distended, horror-fascinated eyes hard on the wall. In these minutes his young faith in God and justice fought to the death with the injustice before him—fought and won.
'He’ll be sentenced Friday,' he found himself thinking, drawing on some half-heard scrap of conversation. 'That’s four days. There’s time enough—'
He dragged himself up and lay down at full length. Something hot smarted upon his face; he put up his hand to find his cheeks wet with tears. They flowed quietly for a long time—soothingly. He fell asleep at last, his lashes still heavy with them.
He was very early at the court-house Friday morning. Cartwright, coming in at nine to his office, crossed the corridor to speak to him—cheerily.
'Well, we got our man, Robbins. You made a good witness—I meant to tell you so before; no confusing you. Look here, my boy, you’re not fretting over this? If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some one else. There’s no covering a crime like that.'
'Not—ever?' said Robbins thickly.
His secret was at his tongue’s end. A glance of interrogation would have brought it spilling out. But there was no interrogation in his companion’s eyes—only an abstracted kindness. He looked away from the lad toward the stragglers along the corridor.
'You came up to hear the sentence? Come in through my office and we’ll find you a seat. The place will be packed.'
'There’s nothing new?' Robbins asked unwillingly. 'No—new evidence?'
'Why, no! The case will be closed in another half-hour. And then I hope it will be a long time before you have any thing to do with a criminal charge again. Now if you want to come in—'
Robbins followed, silent. It did not trouble him to find himself placed conspicuously in the front row. His whole attention was set upon holding fast to the one strand ofhope extended to him. In half an hour it would be over. In half an hour the hideous thing would be folded into the past. But it wouldnot!The case against Whiting would be ended, the arraignment of God would be but just begun! To go on living in a world so guardianed—
The judge entered and took his place; the lawyers on either side filed in to their stations about the long table; the prisoner was brought in, in the custody of a deputy sheriff. There was a little bustle of curiosity to herald his coming. Then the packed room settled to attention.
Robbins leaned forward in his seat. He heard vaguely the opening interchanges of speech. He saw the prisoner rise. The man was clay-colored; his teeth scraped back and forth continually on his dry lower lip. There was no resource in him, no help. And suddenly the watcher knew that help was nowhere. The voice of the judge reached him, low-pitched and solemn, as befitted the occasion.
'—Having been found guilty—decree that you be confined—'
'No!' said Robbins suddenly almost in a scream.
All at once the thing was clear to him. It was not Whiting who was being sentenced: it was God who was on trial, it was truth, good faith, the right to hope.
The impulse of his cry had wrenched him from his chair. He stood flung forward against the rail.
'You can’t! I never saw him! They were tormenting me and I said I did. He wasn’t there—'
Behind him the court-room rang with excitement. He was aware of startled exclamations. He was aware of Cartwright, tragic-eyed, beside him, half-sheltering him, calling to him.
'Robbins! What’s wrong? He’s not speaking under oath. He’s been brooding—'
'It’sso!' said the boy.
For a moment he held himself erect among them, high-headed, joyous, splendid with the exaltation of the martyr. Then, suddenly, his eyes met the eyes of the prisoner. He dropped back into his seat, his shaking hands before his face.
It had lasted a second, less than a second, that frank, involuntary revelation; but in that second, his guard beaten down by sheer amazement, the prisoner’s guilt stood plain in his face. In that second, reading the craven record of it, Robbins saw the glory of martyrdom snatched from him forever—knew himself, now and now only, irrevocably perjured.
HEwas the smallest blind child at Lomax, the State school for deaf and blind children. Even Jimmie Little, who looked like a small gray mouse, and who had always been regarded by the teachers as not much bigger than a minute, appeared large beside Stanislaus. He was so small, in fact, that Mr. Lincoln, the Superintendent, had declined at first to admit him.
'We don’t take children under six,' he had said to Stanislaus’s father when the latter had brought him to Lomax, 'and your little boy doesn’t look five yet.'
'He’ll be five the twenty-second of March,' the father said.
'I’ll be five ve twenty-second of March,' Stanislaus echoed.
He was sitting holding his cap politely between his knees, swinging his fat legs with a gay serenity, while his blind eyes stared away into the dark. He had not been paying much attention to the conversation, being occupied with the working out of a little silent bit of rhythm by an elaborate system of leg-swings: twice out with the right foot; twice with the left; then twice together. He had found that swinging his legs helped to pass the time when grown-ups were talking. The mention of his birthday, however, brought him at once to the surface. That was because Mr. Grey had told him of a wonderful thing which would happen the day he was five. Thereafter his legs swung to the accompaniment of a happy unheard chant:—