CHAPTER XIXTHE SHADOW OF A DREAM

304CHAPTER XIXTHE SHADOW OF A DREAM

Judge Little was moving about mysteriously. It was said that he had found track of Isom’s heir, and that the county was to have its second great sensation soon.Judge Little did not confirm this report, but, like the middling-good politician that he was, he entered no denial. As long as the public is uncertain either way, its suspense is more exquisite, the pleasure of the final revelation is more sweet.Riding home from the trial on the day that Joe made his appearance on the witness-stand, Sol Greening fell in with the judge and, with his nose primed to follow the scent of any new gossip, Sol worked his way into the matter of the will.“Well, I hear you’ve got track of Isom’s boy at last, Judge?” said he, pulling up close beside the judge’s mount, so the sound of the horses’ feet sucking loose from the clay of the muddy road would not cheat him out of a word.Judge Little rode a low, yellow horse, commonly called a “buckskin” in that country. He had come to town unprovided with a rubber coat, and his long black garment of ordinary wear was damp from the blowing mists which presaged the coming rain. In order to save the skirts of it, in which the precious and mysterious pockets were, the judge had gathered them up about his waist, as an old woman gathers her skirts on wash-day. He sat in the saddle, holding them that way with one hand, while he handled the reins with the other.“All things are possible,” returned the judge, his tight old mouth screwed up after the words, as if more stood in the305door and required the utmost vigilance to prevent them popping forth.Sol admitted that all things were indeed possible, although he had his doubts about the probability of a great many he could name. But he was wise enough to know that one must agree with a man if one desires to get into his warm favor, and it was his purpose on that ride to milk Judge Little of whatever information tickling his vanity, as an ant tickles an aphis, would cause him to yield.“Well, he’s got a right smart property waitin’ him when he comes,” said Sol, feeling important and comfortable just to talk of all that Isom left.“A considerable,” agreed the judge.“Say forty or fifty thousand worth, heh?”“Nearer seventy or eighty, the way land’s advancing in this county,” corrected the judge.Sol whistled his amazement. There was no word in his vocabulary as eloquent as that.“Well, all I got to say is that if it was me he left it to, it wouldn’t take no searchin’ to find me,” he said. “Is he married?”“Very likely he is married,” said the judge, with that portentous repression and caution behind his words which some people are able to use with such mysterious effect.“Shades of catnip!” said Sol.They rode on a little way in silence, Sol being quite exhausted on account of his consuming surprise over what he believed himself to be finding out. Presently he returned to his prying, and asked:“Can Ollie come in for her dower rights in case the court lets Isom’s will stand?”“That is a question,” replied the judge, deliberating at his pause and sucking in his cheeks, “which will have to be decided.”306“Does he favor Isom any?” asked Sol.“Who?” queried the judge.“Isom’s boy.”“There doubtless is some resemblance–it is only natural that there should be a resemblance between father and son,” nodded the judge. “But as for myself, I cannot say.”“You ain’t seen him, heh?” said Sol, eyeing him sharply.“Not exactly,” allowed the judge.“Land o’ Moab!” said Sol.They rode on another eighty rods without a word between them.“Got his picture, I reckon?” asked Sol at last, sounding the judge’s face all the while with his eager eyes.“I turn off here,” said the judge. “I’m takin’ the short cut over the ford and through Miller’s place. Looks like the rain would thicken.”He gave Sol good day, and turned off into a brush-grown road which plunged into the woods.Sol went on his way, stirred by comfortable emotions. What a story he meant to spread next day at the county-seat; what a piece of news he was going to be the source of, indeed!Of course, Sol had no knowledge of what was going forward at the county farm that very afternoon, even the very hour when Joe Newbolt was sweating blood on the witness stand, If he had known, it is not likely that he would have waited until morning to spread the tale abroad.This is what it was.Ollie’s lawyer was there in consultation with Uncle John Owens regarding Isom’s will. Consultation is the word, for it had come to that felicitous pass between them. Uncle John could communicate his thoughts freely to his fellow-beings again, and receive theirs intelligently.All this had been wrought not by a miracle, but by the307systematic preparation of the attorney, who was determined to sound the secret which lay locked in that silent mind. If Isom had a son when that will was made a generation back, Uncle John Owens was the man who knew it, and the only living man.In pursuit of this mystery, the lawyer had caused to be printed many little strips of cardboard in the language of the blind. These covered all the ground that he desired to explore, from preliminaries to climax, with every pertinent question which his fertile mind could shape, and every answer which he felt was due to Uncle John to satisfy his curiosity and inform him fully of what had transpired.The attorney had been waiting for Uncle John to become proficient enough in his new reading to proceed without difficulty. He had provided the patriarch with a large slate, which gave him comfortable room for his big characters. Several days before that which the lawyer had set for the exploration of the mystery of Isom Chase’s heir, they had reached a perfect footing of understanding.Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which had come on the attorney’s order speedily. It was an immense volume, as big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons, which, not yet determined.The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had been long and its rising late.On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned308of the death of Isom Chase. The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:“Did you ever witness Isom Chase’s will?”Uncle John took his slate and wrote:“Yes.”“When?”“Thirty or forty years ago,” wrote Uncle John–what was a decade more or less to him? “When he joined the Order.”Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of the rites.“What a sturdy old goat that must have been!” thought the lawyer.“Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?” read the pasteboard under the old man’s hands.Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.“To his son,” he wrote. “Isom was the name.”“Do you know when and where that son was born?”Uncle John’s smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual, as if he had a great deal to say.“He never was born,” he wrote, “not up to the time that I lost the world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that I knew him. He was set on a son from his wedding day.“The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and309told him he would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he reminded me. Did Isom get him?”“No,” was the word that Uncle John’s fingers found. He shook his head, sadly.“He worked and saved for him all his life,” the old man wrote. “He set his hope of that son above the Lord.”Uncle John was given to understand the importance of his information, and that he might be called upon to give it over again in court.He was greatly pleased with the prospect of publicly displaying his new accomplishment. The lawyer gave him a printed good-bye, shook him by the hand warmly, and left him poring over his ponderous book, his dumb lips moving as his fingers spelled out the words.They were near the end and the quieting of all this flurry that had risen over the property of old Isom Chase, said the lawyer to himself as he rode back to town to acquaint his client with her good fortune. There was nothing in the way of her succession to the property now. The probate court would, without question or doubt, throw out that ridiculous document through which old Judge Little hoped to grease his long wallet.With Isom’s will would disappear from the public notice the one testimony of his only tender sentiment, his only human softness; a sentiment and a softness which had been born of a desire and fostered by a dream.Strange that the hard old man should have held to that dream so stubbornly and so long, striving to gain for it, hoarding to enrich it, growing bitterer for its long coming, year by year. And at last he had gone out in a flash, leaving this one speaking piece of evidence of feeling and tenderness behind.310Perhaps Isom Chase would have been different, reflected the lawyer, if fate had yielded him his desire and given him a son; perhaps it would have softened his hand and mellowed his heart in his dealings with those whom he touched; perhaps it would have lifted him above the narrow strivings which had atrophied his virtues, and let the sunlight into the dark places of his soul.So communing with himself, he arrived in town. The people were coming out of the court-house, the lowering gray clouds were settling mistily. But it was a clearing day for his client; he hastened on to tell her of the turn fortune had made in her behalf.

Judge Little was moving about mysteriously. It was said that he had found track of Isom’s heir, and that the county was to have its second great sensation soon.

Judge Little did not confirm this report, but, like the middling-good politician that he was, he entered no denial. As long as the public is uncertain either way, its suspense is more exquisite, the pleasure of the final revelation is more sweet.

Riding home from the trial on the day that Joe made his appearance on the witness-stand, Sol Greening fell in with the judge and, with his nose primed to follow the scent of any new gossip, Sol worked his way into the matter of the will.

“Well, I hear you’ve got track of Isom’s boy at last, Judge?” said he, pulling up close beside the judge’s mount, so the sound of the horses’ feet sucking loose from the clay of the muddy road would not cheat him out of a word.

Judge Little rode a low, yellow horse, commonly called a “buckskin” in that country. He had come to town unprovided with a rubber coat, and his long black garment of ordinary wear was damp from the blowing mists which presaged the coming rain. In order to save the skirts of it, in which the precious and mysterious pockets were, the judge had gathered them up about his waist, as an old woman gathers her skirts on wash-day. He sat in the saddle, holding them that way with one hand, while he handled the reins with the other.

“All things are possible,” returned the judge, his tight old mouth screwed up after the words, as if more stood in the305door and required the utmost vigilance to prevent them popping forth.

Sol admitted that all things were indeed possible, although he had his doubts about the probability of a great many he could name. But he was wise enough to know that one must agree with a man if one desires to get into his warm favor, and it was his purpose on that ride to milk Judge Little of whatever information tickling his vanity, as an ant tickles an aphis, would cause him to yield.

“Well, he’s got a right smart property waitin’ him when he comes,” said Sol, feeling important and comfortable just to talk of all that Isom left.

“A considerable,” agreed the judge.

“Say forty or fifty thousand worth, heh?”

“Nearer seventy or eighty, the way land’s advancing in this county,” corrected the judge.

Sol whistled his amazement. There was no word in his vocabulary as eloquent as that.

“Well, all I got to say is that if it was me he left it to, it wouldn’t take no searchin’ to find me,” he said. “Is he married?”

“Very likely he is married,” said the judge, with that portentous repression and caution behind his words which some people are able to use with such mysterious effect.

“Shades of catnip!” said Sol.

They rode on a little way in silence, Sol being quite exhausted on account of his consuming surprise over what he believed himself to be finding out. Presently he returned to his prying, and asked:

“Can Ollie come in for her dower rights in case the court lets Isom’s will stand?”

“That is a question,” replied the judge, deliberating at his pause and sucking in his cheeks, “which will have to be decided.”306

“Does he favor Isom any?” asked Sol.

“Who?” queried the judge.

“Isom’s boy.”

“There doubtless is some resemblance–it is only natural that there should be a resemblance between father and son,” nodded the judge. “But as for myself, I cannot say.”

“You ain’t seen him, heh?” said Sol, eyeing him sharply.

“Not exactly,” allowed the judge.

“Land o’ Moab!” said Sol.

They rode on another eighty rods without a word between them.

“Got his picture, I reckon?” asked Sol at last, sounding the judge’s face all the while with his eager eyes.

“I turn off here,” said the judge. “I’m takin’ the short cut over the ford and through Miller’s place. Looks like the rain would thicken.”

He gave Sol good day, and turned off into a brush-grown road which plunged into the woods.

Sol went on his way, stirred by comfortable emotions. What a story he meant to spread next day at the county-seat; what a piece of news he was going to be the source of, indeed!

Of course, Sol had no knowledge of what was going forward at the county farm that very afternoon, even the very hour when Joe Newbolt was sweating blood on the witness stand, If he had known, it is not likely that he would have waited until morning to spread the tale abroad.

This is what it was.

Ollie’s lawyer was there in consultation with Uncle John Owens regarding Isom’s will. Consultation is the word, for it had come to that felicitous pass between them. Uncle John could communicate his thoughts freely to his fellow-beings again, and receive theirs intelligently.

All this had been wrought not by a miracle, but by the307systematic preparation of the attorney, who was determined to sound the secret which lay locked in that silent mind. If Isom had a son when that will was made a generation back, Uncle John Owens was the man who knew it, and the only living man.

In pursuit of this mystery, the lawyer had caused to be printed many little strips of cardboard in the language of the blind. These covered all the ground that he desired to explore, from preliminaries to climax, with every pertinent question which his fertile mind could shape, and every answer which he felt was due to Uncle John to satisfy his curiosity and inform him fully of what had transpired.

The attorney had been waiting for Uncle John to become proficient enough in his new reading to proceed without difficulty. He had provided the patriarch with a large slate, which gave him comfortable room for his big characters. Several days before that which the lawyer had set for the exploration of the mystery of Isom Chase’s heir, they had reached a perfect footing of understanding.

Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which had come on the attorney’s order speedily. It was an immense volume, as big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons, which, not yet determined.

The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had been long and its rising late.

On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned308of the death of Isom Chase. The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.

After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:

“Did you ever witness Isom Chase’s will?”

Uncle John took his slate and wrote:

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Thirty or forty years ago,” wrote Uncle John–what was a decade more or less to him? “When he joined the Order.”

Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.

More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of the rites.

“What a sturdy old goat that must have been!” thought the lawyer.

“Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?” read the pasteboard under the old man’s hands.

Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.

“To his son,” he wrote. “Isom was the name.”

“Do you know when and where that son was born?”

Uncle John’s smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual, as if he had a great deal to say.

“He never was born,” he wrote, “not up to the time that I lost the world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that I knew him. He was set on a son from his wedding day.

“The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and309told him he would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he reminded me. Did Isom get him?”

“No,” was the word that Uncle John’s fingers found. He shook his head, sadly.

“He worked and saved for him all his life,” the old man wrote. “He set his hope of that son above the Lord.”

Uncle John was given to understand the importance of his information, and that he might be called upon to give it over again in court.

He was greatly pleased with the prospect of publicly displaying his new accomplishment. The lawyer gave him a printed good-bye, shook him by the hand warmly, and left him poring over his ponderous book, his dumb lips moving as his fingers spelled out the words.

They were near the end and the quieting of all this flurry that had risen over the property of old Isom Chase, said the lawyer to himself as he rode back to town to acquaint his client with her good fortune. There was nothing in the way of her succession to the property now. The probate court would, without question or doubt, throw out that ridiculous document through which old Judge Little hoped to grease his long wallet.

With Isom’s will would disappear from the public notice the one testimony of his only tender sentiment, his only human softness; a sentiment and a softness which had been born of a desire and fostered by a dream.

Strange that the hard old man should have held to that dream so stubbornly and so long, striving to gain for it, hoarding to enrich it, growing bitterer for its long coming, year by year. And at last he had gone out in a flash, leaving this one speaking piece of evidence of feeling and tenderness behind.310

Perhaps Isom Chase would have been different, reflected the lawyer, if fate had yielded him his desire and given him a son; perhaps it would have softened his hand and mellowed his heart in his dealings with those whom he touched; perhaps it would have lifted him above the narrow strivings which had atrophied his virtues, and let the sunlight into the dark places of his soul.

So communing with himself, he arrived in town. The people were coming out of the court-house, the lowering gray clouds were settling mistily. But it was a clearing day for his client; he hastened on to tell her of the turn fortune had made in her behalf.

311CHAPTER XX“THE PENALTY IS DEATH!”

When court convened the following morning for the last act in the prolonged drama of Joe Newbolt’s trial, the room was crowded even beyond the congestion of the previous day.People felt that Sam Lucas was not through with the accused lad yet; they wanted to be present for the final and complete crucifixion. It was generally believed that, under the strain of Lucas’s bombardment, Joe would break down that day.The interference of Alice Price, unwarranted and beyond reason, the public said, had given the accused a respite, but nothing more. Whatever mistaken notion she had in doing it was beyond them, for it was inconceivable that she could be wiser than another, and discover virtues in the accused that older and wiser heads had overlooked. Well, after the rebuke that Judge Maxwell had given her,shewouldn’t meddle again soon. It was more than anybody expected to see her in court again. No, indeed, they said; that would just about settleher.Such a fine girl, too, and such a blow to her father. It was a piece of forwardness that went beyond the imagination of anybody in the town. Could it be that Alice Price had become tainted with socialism or woman’s rights, or any of those wild theories which roared around the wide world outside Shelbyville and created such commotion and unrest? Maybe some of those German doctrines had got into her head, such as that young Professor Gobel, whom the regents discharged from the college faculty last winter, used to teach.312It was too bad; nearly everybody regretted it, for it took a girl a long time to live down a thing like that in Shelbyville. But the greatest shock and disappointment of all was, although nobody would admit it, that she had shut Joe’s mouth on the very thing that the public ear was itching to hear. She had cheated the public of its due, and taken the food out of its mouth when it was ravenous. That was past forgiveness.Dark conjectures were hatched, therefore, and scandalous hints were set traveling. Mothers said, well, they thanked their stars that she hadn’t marriedtheirsons; and fathers philosophized that you never could tell how a filly would turn out till you put the saddle on her and tried her on the road. And the public sighed and gasped and shook its head, and was comfortably shocked and satisfyingly scandalized.The sheriff brought the prisoner into court that morning with free hands. Joe’s face seemed almost beatific in its exalted serenity as he saluted his waiting mother with a smile. To those who had seen the gray pallor of his strained face yesterday, it appeared as if he had cast his skin during the night, and with it his harassments and haunting fears, and had come out this morning as fresh and unscarred as a child.Joe stood for a moment running his eyes swiftly over the room. When they found the face they sought a warm light shot into them as if he had turned up the wick of his soul. She was not so near the front as on the day before, yet she was close enough for eye to speak to eye.People marked the exchange of unspoken salutations between them, and nudged each other, and whispered: “There she is!” They wondered how she was going to cut up today, and whether it would not end for her by getting herself sent to jail, along with that scatter-feathered young crow whom she seemed to have taken into her heart.313Ollie was present, although Joe had not expected to see her, he knew not why. She was sitting in the first row of benches, so near him he could have reached over and taken her hand. He bowed to her; she gave him a sickly smile, which looked on her pale face like a dim breaking of sun through wintry clouds.To the great surprise and greater disappointment of the public in attendance upon the trial, Sam Lucas announced, when court opened, that the state would not proceed with the cross-examination of the defendant. Hammer rose with that and stated that the defense rested. He had no more witnesses to call.Hammer wore a hopeful look over his features that morning, a reflection, perhaps, of his client’s unworried attitude. He had not been successful in his attempt to interview Alice Price, although he had visited her home the night before. Colonel Price had received him with the air of one who stoops to contact with an inferior, and assured him that he was delegated by Miss Price–which was true–to tell Mr. Hammer that she knew nothing favorable to his client’s cause; that her caution in his moment of stress had nothing behind it but the unaccountable impulse of a young and sympathetic girl.Hammer accepted that explanation with a large corner of reservation in his mind. He knew that she had visited the jail, and it was his opinion that his client had taken her behind the door of his confidence, which he had closed to his attorney. Alice Price knew something, she must know something, Hammer said. On that belief he based his intention of a motion for a new trial in case of conviction. He would advance the contention that new evidence had been discovered; he would then get Alice Price into a corner by herself somewhere and make her tell all she knew.That was why Hammer smiled and felt quite easy, and314turned over in his mind the moving speech that he had prepared for the jury. He was glad of the opportunity which that great gathering presented. It was a plowed field waiting the grain of Hammer’s future prosperity.Hammer kept turning his eyes toward Alice Price, where she sat in the middle of the court-room beside the colonel. He had marked an air of uneasiness, a paleness as of suppressed anxiety in the girl’s face. Now and then he saw her look toward the door where Captain Taylor stood guard, in his G. A. R. uniform today, as if it were a gala occasion and demanded decorations.For whom could she be straining and watching? Hammer wondered. Ah, no doubt about it, that girl knew a great deal more of the inner-working of his client’s mind than he did. But she couldn’t keep her secret. He’d get it out of her after filing his motion for a new trial–already he was looking ahead to conviction, feeling the weakness of his case–and very likely turn the sensation of a generation loose in Shelbyville when he called her to the witness-stand. That was the manner of Hammer’s speculations as he watched her turning her eyes toward the door.Ollie sat beside her mother, strangely downcast for all the brightening of her affairs. Joe had passed through the fire and come out true, although he might have faltered and betrayed her if it had not been for the sharp warning of Alice Price, cast to him like a rope to a drowning man. Like Hammer, like a thousand others, she wondered why Alice had uttered that warning. What did she know? What did she suspect? It was certain, above everything else, that she knew Joe was guiltless. She knew that he was not maintaining silence on his own account.How did she know? Had Joe told her? Ollie struggled with the doubt and perplexity of it, and the fear which lay deep in her being made her long to cringe there, and shield315her face as from fire. She could not do that, any more than she had succeeded in her desire to remain away from court that morning. There was no need for her there, her testimony was in, they were through with her. Yet she could not stay away. She must be there for the final word, for the last sight of Joe’s prison-white face.She must whip herself to sit there as boldly as innocence and cheat the public into accepting the blanched cheek of fear for the wearing strain of sorrow; she must sit there until the end. Then she could rise up and go her way, no matter how it turned out for Joe. She could leave there with her guilty secret in her heart and the shame of her cowardice burning like a smothered coal in her breast.It would hurt to know that Joe had gone to prison for her sake, even though he once had stepped into the doorway of her freedom and cut off her light. The knowledge that Alice Price loved him, and that Joe loved her, for she had read the secret in their burning eyes, would make it doubly hard. She would be cheating him of liberty and robbing him of love. Still, they would be no more than even, at that, said she, with a recurring sweep of bitterness. Had Joe not denied them both to her? All of this she turned in her mind as she sat waiting for court to open that somber morning.The rain in yesterday’s threat had come; it was streaking the windows gray, and the sound of the wind was in the trees, waving their bare limbs as in fantastic grief against the dull clouds. There was no comfort in youth and health and prettiness of face and form; no pride in possession of lands and money, when a hot and tortuous thing like conscience was lying so ill-concealed behind the thin wall of her breast.She thought bitterly of Curtis Morgan, who had failed her so completely. Never again in the march of her years would she need the support of his hand and comforting affection as316she needed it then. But he had gone away and forgotten, like a careless hunter who leaves his uncovered fire after him to spring in the wind and go raging with destructive curse through the forest. He had struck the spark to warm himself a night in its pleasurable glow; the hands of ten thousand men could not quench its flame today.Judge Maxwell had been conferring with the lawyers in the case these few minutes, setting a limit to their periods of oration before the jury, to which both sides agreed after the usual protestations. The court-room was very quiet; expectancy sat upon the faces of all who waited when Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose and began his address to the jury.He began by calling attention to what he termed the “peculiar atrocity of this crime,” and the circumstances surrounding it. He pointed out that there could have been no motive of revenge behind the act, for the evidence had shown, even the testimony of the defendant himself had shown, that the relations between Chase and his bondman were friendly. Isom Chase had been kind to him; he had reposed his entire trust in him, and had gone away to serve his country as a juryman, leaving everything in his hands.“And he returned from that duty, gentlemen,” said he, “to meet death at the treacherous hands of the man whom he had trusted, there upon his own threshold.“When Isom Chase was found there by his neighbor, Sol Greening, gentlemen, this bag of money was clasped to his lifeless breast. Where did it come from? What was Isom Chase doing with it there at that hour of the night? This defendant has testified that he does not know. Did Isom Chase carry it with him when he entered the house? Not likely.“You have heard the testimony of the bankers of this city to the effect that he carried no deposit with any of them.317Isom Chase had returned to his home that fatal night from serving on a jury in this court-house. That duty held him there until past ten o’clock, as the records show. Where did that bag of gold come from? What was it doing there? This defendant has sworn that he never saw it before, that he knows nothing at all about it. Yet he admits that ‘words’ passed between him and Isom Chase that night.“What those words were he has locked up in the secret darkness of his guilty breast. He has refused to tell you what they were, refused against the kindly counsel of the court, the prayers of his aged mother, the advice of his own attorney, and of his best friends. Joe Newbolt has refused to repeat those words to you, gentlemen of the jury, but I will tell you what the substance of them was.”The prosecutor made a dramatic pause; he flung his long, fair locks back from his forehead; he leveled his finger at Joe as if he held a weapon aimed to shoot him through the heart.Mrs. Newbolt looked at the prosecutor searchingly. She could not understand why the judge allowed him to say a thing like that. Joe displayed no indication of the turmoil of his heart. But the light was fading out of his face, the gray mist of pain was sweeping over it again.“Those words, gentlemen of the jury,” resumed the prosecutor, “were words of accusation from the lips of Isom Chase when he entered that door and saw this man, his trusted servant, making away with that bag of money, the hoarded savings of Isom Chase through many an industrious year.“I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, that this defendant, afraid of the consequences of his act when he found himself discovered in the theft, and was compelled to surrender the money to its lawful owner–I tell you then, in that evil moment of passion and disappointment, this defendant318snatched that rifle from the wall and shot honest, hardworking old Isom Chase down like a dog!”“No, no!” cried Mrs. Newbolt, casting out her hands in passionate denial. “Joe didn’t do it!”“Your honor,” began the prosecutor, turning to the court with an expression of injury in his voice which was almost tearful, “am I to be interrupted––”“Madam, you must not speak again,” admonished the judge. “Mr. Sheriff, see that the order is obeyed.”The sheriff leaned over.“Ma’am, I’ll have to put you out of here if you do that agin,” said he.Joe placed his hand on his mother’s shoulder and whispered to her. She nodded, as if in obedience to his wish, but she sat straight and alert, her dark eyes glowing with anger as she looked at the prosecutor.The prosecutor was composing himself to proceed.“This defendant had robbed old Isom Chase of his hoarded gold, gentlemen of the jury, and that was not all. I tell you, gentlemen, Joe Newbolt had robbed that trusting old man of more than his gold. He had robbed him of his sacred honor!”Hammer entered vociferous objections. Nothing to maintain this charge had been proved by the state, said he. He insisted that the jury be instructed to disregard what had been said, and the prosecutor admonished by the court to confine himself to the evidence.The court ruled accordingly.“There has been ample evidence on this point,” contended the prosecutor. “The conspiracy of silence entered into between this defendant and the widow of Isom Chase–entered into and maintained throughout this trial–is sufficient to brand them guilty of this charge before the world. More; when Sol Greening’s wife arrived a few minutes after319the shooting, Mrs. Chase was fully dressed, in a dress, gentlemen of the jury, that it would have taken her longer to put on––”Merely surmises, said Hammer. If surmises were to be admitted before that court and that jury, said he, he could surmise his client out of there in two minutes. But the court was of the opinion that the evidence warranted the prosecutor there. He was allowed to proceed.“Ollie Chase could not have dressed herself that way in those few intervening minutes. She had made her preparations long before that tragic hour; she was ready and waiting–waiting for what?“Gentlemen, I will tell you. Joe Newbolt had discovered the hiding-place of his employer’s money. He had stolen it, and was preparing to depart in secrecy in the dead of night; and I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, he was not going alone!”“Oh, what a scandalous lie!” said Mrs. Newbolt in a horrified voice which, low-pitched and groaning that it was carried to the farthest corner of that big, solemn room.The outburst caused a little movement in the room, attended by considerable noise and some shifting of feet. Some laughed, for there are some to laugh everywhere at the most sincere emotions of the human breast. The judge rapped for order. A flush of anger mounted to his usually passive face; he turned to the sheriff with a gesture of command.“Remove that woman from the room, Mr. Sheriff, and retain her in custody!” said he.The sheriff came forward hastily and took Mrs. Newbolt by the arm. She stood at his touch and stretched out her hands to the judge.“I didn’t mean to say it out loud, Judge Maxwell, but I thought it so hard, I reckon, sir, that it got away. Anybody that knows my Joe––”320“Come on, ma’am,” the sheriff ordered.Joe was on his feet. The sheriff’s special deputy put his hands on the prisoner’s shoulders and tried to force him down into his seat. The deputy was a little man, sandy, freckled, and frail, and his efforts, ludicrously eager, threw the court-room into a fit of unseemly laughter. The little man might as well have attempted to bend one of the oak columns which supported the court-house portico.Judge Maxwell was properly angry now. He rapped loudly, and threatened penalties for contempt. When the mirth quieted, which it did with a suddenness almost tragic, Joe spoke. “I wish to apologize to you for mother’s words, sir,” said he, addressing the judge, inclining his head slightly to the prosecuting attorney afterward, as if to include him, upon second thought. “She was moved out of her calm and dignity by the statement of Mr. Lucas, sir, and I give you my word of honor that she’ll say no more. I’d like to have her here by me, sir, if you’d grant me that favor. You can understand, sir, that a man needs a friend at his side in an hour like this.”Judge Maxwell’s face was losing its redness of wrath; the hard lines were melting out of it. He pondered a moment, looking with gathered brows at Joe. The little deputy had given over his struggle, and now stood with one hand twisted in the back of Joe’s coat. The sheriff kept his hold on Mrs. Newbolt’s arm. She lifted her contrite face to the judge, tears in her eyes.“Very well,” said the judge, “the court will accept your apology, and hold you responsible for her future behavior. Madam, resume your seat, and do not interrupt the prosecuting attorney again.”Mrs. Newbolt justified Joe’s plea by sitting quietly while the prosecutor continued. But her interruption had acted like an explosion in the train of his ideas; he was so much321disconcerted by it that he finished rather tamely, reserving his force, as people understood, for his closing speech.Hammer rose in consequence, and plunged into the effort of his life. He painted the character of Isom Chase in horrible guise; he pointed out his narrowness, his wickedness, his cruelty, his quickness to lift his hand. He wept and he sobbed, and splashed tears all around him.It was one of the most satisfying pieces of public oratory ever heard in Shelbyville, from the standpoint of sentiment, and the view of the unschooled. But as a legal and logical argument it was as foolish and futile as Hammer’s own fat tears. He kept it up for an hour, and he might have gone on for another if his tears had not given out. Without tears, Hammer’s eloquence dwindled and his oratory dried.Mrs. Newbolt blessed him in her heart, and the irresponsible and vacillating public wiped its cheeks clean of its tears and settled down to have its emotions warped the other way. Everybody said that Hammer had done well. He had made a fine effort, it showed what they had contended for all along, that Hammer had it naturally in him, and was bound to land in congress yet.When the prosecutor resumed for the last word he seemed to be in a vicious temper. He seemed to be prompted by motives of revenge, rather than justice. If he had been a near relative of the deceased, under the obligation of exacting life for life with his own hands, he could not have shown more vindictive personal resentment against the accused. He reverted to Joe’s reservation in his testimony.“There is no question in my mind, gentlemen of the jury,” said he, “that the silence behind which this defendant hides is the silence of guilt, and that silence brands him blacker than any confession that his tongue could make.“‘Words passed between us,’ and ‘it was between him and322me.’ That, gentlemen of the jury, is the explanation this defendant gives, the only, the weak, the obviously dishonest explanation, that he ever has offered, or that the kindly admonishment of this court could draw from his lips. Guilt sits on his face; every line of his base countenance is a confession; every brutal snarl from his reluctant tongue is testimony of his evil heart. He was a thief, and, when he was caught, he murdered. ‘Out of his own mouth he has uttered his condemnation,’ and there is but one penalty fitting this hideous crime–the penalty of death!“Never before has the fair name of our county been stained by such an atrocious crime; never before has there been such a conspiracy between the guilty to defeat the ends of justice in this moral and respected community. I call upon you, gentlemen of the jury, for the safety of our households and the sanctity of our hearths, to bring in your verdict of guilty under the indictment.“It is a solemn and awful thing to stand here in the presence of the Almighty and ask the life of one of his creatures, made by Him in His own image and endowed by Him with reason and superiority above all else that moves on the earth or in the waters under it. But this man, Joe Newbolt, has debased that image and abused that reason and superiority which raises him above the beasts of the field. He has murdered a defenseless old man; he has, by that act and deed, forfeited his right to life and liberty under the law.”The prosecutor made one of his effective pauses. There was the stillness of midnight in the crowded court-room. The sound of dashing rain was loud on the window-panes, the hoarse voice of the gray old elm which combed the wind with its high-flung branches, was like the distant groan of the sea.In that aching silence Ollie Chase turned suddenly, as if she had heard someone call her name. She started, her white face grew whiter. But nobody seemed conscious of her323presence, except the prosecutor, who wheeled upon her and leveled his accusing finger at her where she sat.There was the bearing of sudden and reckless impulse in his act. He surely had not meditated that bold challenge of one who had passed under his merciless hand, and was now, according to all accepted procedure, beyond his reach and his concern. But Sam Lucas did that unusual thing. He stood pointing at her, his jaw trembling as if the intensity of his passion had palsied his tongue.“Gentlemen of the jury, what part this woman played in that dark night’s work the world may never know,” said he. “But the world is not blind, and its judgments are usually justified by time. This woman, Ollie Chase, and this defendant have conspired to hold silence between them, in what hope, to what unholy end, God alone knows. But who will believe the weak and improbable story this woman has told on the witness-stand? Who is so blind that he cannot see the stain of her infidelity and the ghastly blight of that midnight shadow upon her quaking soul?”He turned from her abruptly. Hammer partly rose, as if to enter an objection. He seemed to reconsider it, and sat down. Ollie shrank against her mother’s shoulders, trembling. The older woman, fierce as a dragon in the sudden focus of the crowd’s attention and eyes, fixed in one shifting sweep from the prosecuting attorney to her daughter, put her arm about Ollie and comforted her with whispered words.The prosecutor proceeded, solemnly:“I tell you, gentlemen, that these two people, Ollie Chase and Joseph Newbolt, alone in that house that night, alone in that house for two days before this tragedy darkened it, before the blood of gray old Isom Chase ran down upon its threshold, these two conspired in their guilt to hide the truth.324“If this woman would open her lips, if this woman would break the seal of this guilty compact and speak, the mystery of this case would dissolve, and the heroic romance which this defendant is trying to put over the squalid facts of his guilt would turn out only a sordid story of midnight lust and robbery. If conscience would trouble this woman to speak, gentlemen of the jury–but she has no conscience, and she has no heart!”He turned again to Ollie, savagely; her mother covered her with her arm, as if to protect her from a blow.“There she cowers in her guilty silence, in what hope God alone knows, but if she would speak––”“I will speak!” Ollie cried.

When court convened the following morning for the last act in the prolonged drama of Joe Newbolt’s trial, the room was crowded even beyond the congestion of the previous day.

People felt that Sam Lucas was not through with the accused lad yet; they wanted to be present for the final and complete crucifixion. It was generally believed that, under the strain of Lucas’s bombardment, Joe would break down that day.

The interference of Alice Price, unwarranted and beyond reason, the public said, had given the accused a respite, but nothing more. Whatever mistaken notion she had in doing it was beyond them, for it was inconceivable that she could be wiser than another, and discover virtues in the accused that older and wiser heads had overlooked. Well, after the rebuke that Judge Maxwell had given her,shewouldn’t meddle again soon. It was more than anybody expected to see her in court again. No, indeed, they said; that would just about settleher.

Such a fine girl, too, and such a blow to her father. It was a piece of forwardness that went beyond the imagination of anybody in the town. Could it be that Alice Price had become tainted with socialism or woman’s rights, or any of those wild theories which roared around the wide world outside Shelbyville and created such commotion and unrest? Maybe some of those German doctrines had got into her head, such as that young Professor Gobel, whom the regents discharged from the college faculty last winter, used to teach.312

It was too bad; nearly everybody regretted it, for it took a girl a long time to live down a thing like that in Shelbyville. But the greatest shock and disappointment of all was, although nobody would admit it, that she had shut Joe’s mouth on the very thing that the public ear was itching to hear. She had cheated the public of its due, and taken the food out of its mouth when it was ravenous. That was past forgiveness.

Dark conjectures were hatched, therefore, and scandalous hints were set traveling. Mothers said, well, they thanked their stars that she hadn’t marriedtheirsons; and fathers philosophized that you never could tell how a filly would turn out till you put the saddle on her and tried her on the road. And the public sighed and gasped and shook its head, and was comfortably shocked and satisfyingly scandalized.

The sheriff brought the prisoner into court that morning with free hands. Joe’s face seemed almost beatific in its exalted serenity as he saluted his waiting mother with a smile. To those who had seen the gray pallor of his strained face yesterday, it appeared as if he had cast his skin during the night, and with it his harassments and haunting fears, and had come out this morning as fresh and unscarred as a child.

Joe stood for a moment running his eyes swiftly over the room. When they found the face they sought a warm light shot into them as if he had turned up the wick of his soul. She was not so near the front as on the day before, yet she was close enough for eye to speak to eye.

People marked the exchange of unspoken salutations between them, and nudged each other, and whispered: “There she is!” They wondered how she was going to cut up today, and whether it would not end for her by getting herself sent to jail, along with that scatter-feathered young crow whom she seemed to have taken into her heart.313

Ollie was present, although Joe had not expected to see her, he knew not why. She was sitting in the first row of benches, so near him he could have reached over and taken her hand. He bowed to her; she gave him a sickly smile, which looked on her pale face like a dim breaking of sun through wintry clouds.

To the great surprise and greater disappointment of the public in attendance upon the trial, Sam Lucas announced, when court opened, that the state would not proceed with the cross-examination of the defendant. Hammer rose with that and stated that the defense rested. He had no more witnesses to call.

Hammer wore a hopeful look over his features that morning, a reflection, perhaps, of his client’s unworried attitude. He had not been successful in his attempt to interview Alice Price, although he had visited her home the night before. Colonel Price had received him with the air of one who stoops to contact with an inferior, and assured him that he was delegated by Miss Price–which was true–to tell Mr. Hammer that she knew nothing favorable to his client’s cause; that her caution in his moment of stress had nothing behind it but the unaccountable impulse of a young and sympathetic girl.

Hammer accepted that explanation with a large corner of reservation in his mind. He knew that she had visited the jail, and it was his opinion that his client had taken her behind the door of his confidence, which he had closed to his attorney. Alice Price knew something, she must know something, Hammer said. On that belief he based his intention of a motion for a new trial in case of conviction. He would advance the contention that new evidence had been discovered; he would then get Alice Price into a corner by herself somewhere and make her tell all she knew.

That was why Hammer smiled and felt quite easy, and314turned over in his mind the moving speech that he had prepared for the jury. He was glad of the opportunity which that great gathering presented. It was a plowed field waiting the grain of Hammer’s future prosperity.

Hammer kept turning his eyes toward Alice Price, where she sat in the middle of the court-room beside the colonel. He had marked an air of uneasiness, a paleness as of suppressed anxiety in the girl’s face. Now and then he saw her look toward the door where Captain Taylor stood guard, in his G. A. R. uniform today, as if it were a gala occasion and demanded decorations.

For whom could she be straining and watching? Hammer wondered. Ah, no doubt about it, that girl knew a great deal more of the inner-working of his client’s mind than he did. But she couldn’t keep her secret. He’d get it out of her after filing his motion for a new trial–already he was looking ahead to conviction, feeling the weakness of his case–and very likely turn the sensation of a generation loose in Shelbyville when he called her to the witness-stand. That was the manner of Hammer’s speculations as he watched her turning her eyes toward the door.

Ollie sat beside her mother, strangely downcast for all the brightening of her affairs. Joe had passed through the fire and come out true, although he might have faltered and betrayed her if it had not been for the sharp warning of Alice Price, cast to him like a rope to a drowning man. Like Hammer, like a thousand others, she wondered why Alice had uttered that warning. What did she know? What did she suspect? It was certain, above everything else, that she knew Joe was guiltless. She knew that he was not maintaining silence on his own account.

How did she know? Had Joe told her? Ollie struggled with the doubt and perplexity of it, and the fear which lay deep in her being made her long to cringe there, and shield315her face as from fire. She could not do that, any more than she had succeeded in her desire to remain away from court that morning. There was no need for her there, her testimony was in, they were through with her. Yet she could not stay away. She must be there for the final word, for the last sight of Joe’s prison-white face.

She must whip herself to sit there as boldly as innocence and cheat the public into accepting the blanched cheek of fear for the wearing strain of sorrow; she must sit there until the end. Then she could rise up and go her way, no matter how it turned out for Joe. She could leave there with her guilty secret in her heart and the shame of her cowardice burning like a smothered coal in her breast.

It would hurt to know that Joe had gone to prison for her sake, even though he once had stepped into the doorway of her freedom and cut off her light. The knowledge that Alice Price loved him, and that Joe loved her, for she had read the secret in their burning eyes, would make it doubly hard. She would be cheating him of liberty and robbing him of love. Still, they would be no more than even, at that, said she, with a recurring sweep of bitterness. Had Joe not denied them both to her? All of this she turned in her mind as she sat waiting for court to open that somber morning.

The rain in yesterday’s threat had come; it was streaking the windows gray, and the sound of the wind was in the trees, waving their bare limbs as in fantastic grief against the dull clouds. There was no comfort in youth and health and prettiness of face and form; no pride in possession of lands and money, when a hot and tortuous thing like conscience was lying so ill-concealed behind the thin wall of her breast.

She thought bitterly of Curtis Morgan, who had failed her so completely. Never again in the march of her years would she need the support of his hand and comforting affection as316she needed it then. But he had gone away and forgotten, like a careless hunter who leaves his uncovered fire after him to spring in the wind and go raging with destructive curse through the forest. He had struck the spark to warm himself a night in its pleasurable glow; the hands of ten thousand men could not quench its flame today.

Judge Maxwell had been conferring with the lawyers in the case these few minutes, setting a limit to their periods of oration before the jury, to which both sides agreed after the usual protestations. The court-room was very quiet; expectancy sat upon the faces of all who waited when Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose and began his address to the jury.

He began by calling attention to what he termed the “peculiar atrocity of this crime,” and the circumstances surrounding it. He pointed out that there could have been no motive of revenge behind the act, for the evidence had shown, even the testimony of the defendant himself had shown, that the relations between Chase and his bondman were friendly. Isom Chase had been kind to him; he had reposed his entire trust in him, and had gone away to serve his country as a juryman, leaving everything in his hands.

“And he returned from that duty, gentlemen,” said he, “to meet death at the treacherous hands of the man whom he had trusted, there upon his own threshold.

“When Isom Chase was found there by his neighbor, Sol Greening, gentlemen, this bag of money was clasped to his lifeless breast. Where did it come from? What was Isom Chase doing with it there at that hour of the night? This defendant has testified that he does not know. Did Isom Chase carry it with him when he entered the house? Not likely.

“You have heard the testimony of the bankers of this city to the effect that he carried no deposit with any of them.317Isom Chase had returned to his home that fatal night from serving on a jury in this court-house. That duty held him there until past ten o’clock, as the records show. Where did that bag of gold come from? What was it doing there? This defendant has sworn that he never saw it before, that he knows nothing at all about it. Yet he admits that ‘words’ passed between him and Isom Chase that night.

“What those words were he has locked up in the secret darkness of his guilty breast. He has refused to tell you what they were, refused against the kindly counsel of the court, the prayers of his aged mother, the advice of his own attorney, and of his best friends. Joe Newbolt has refused to repeat those words to you, gentlemen of the jury, but I will tell you what the substance of them was.”

The prosecutor made a dramatic pause; he flung his long, fair locks back from his forehead; he leveled his finger at Joe as if he held a weapon aimed to shoot him through the heart.

Mrs. Newbolt looked at the prosecutor searchingly. She could not understand why the judge allowed him to say a thing like that. Joe displayed no indication of the turmoil of his heart. But the light was fading out of his face, the gray mist of pain was sweeping over it again.

“Those words, gentlemen of the jury,” resumed the prosecutor, “were words of accusation from the lips of Isom Chase when he entered that door and saw this man, his trusted servant, making away with that bag of money, the hoarded savings of Isom Chase through many an industrious year.

“I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, that this defendant, afraid of the consequences of his act when he found himself discovered in the theft, and was compelled to surrender the money to its lawful owner–I tell you then, in that evil moment of passion and disappointment, this defendant318snatched that rifle from the wall and shot honest, hardworking old Isom Chase down like a dog!”

“No, no!” cried Mrs. Newbolt, casting out her hands in passionate denial. “Joe didn’t do it!”

“Your honor,” began the prosecutor, turning to the court with an expression of injury in his voice which was almost tearful, “am I to be interrupted––”

“Madam, you must not speak again,” admonished the judge. “Mr. Sheriff, see that the order is obeyed.”

The sheriff leaned over.

“Ma’am, I’ll have to put you out of here if you do that agin,” said he.

Joe placed his hand on his mother’s shoulder and whispered to her. She nodded, as if in obedience to his wish, but she sat straight and alert, her dark eyes glowing with anger as she looked at the prosecutor.

The prosecutor was composing himself to proceed.

“This defendant had robbed old Isom Chase of his hoarded gold, gentlemen of the jury, and that was not all. I tell you, gentlemen, Joe Newbolt had robbed that trusting old man of more than his gold. He had robbed him of his sacred honor!”

Hammer entered vociferous objections. Nothing to maintain this charge had been proved by the state, said he. He insisted that the jury be instructed to disregard what had been said, and the prosecutor admonished by the court to confine himself to the evidence.

The court ruled accordingly.

“There has been ample evidence on this point,” contended the prosecutor. “The conspiracy of silence entered into between this defendant and the widow of Isom Chase–entered into and maintained throughout this trial–is sufficient to brand them guilty of this charge before the world. More; when Sol Greening’s wife arrived a few minutes after319the shooting, Mrs. Chase was fully dressed, in a dress, gentlemen of the jury, that it would have taken her longer to put on––”

Merely surmises, said Hammer. If surmises were to be admitted before that court and that jury, said he, he could surmise his client out of there in two minutes. But the court was of the opinion that the evidence warranted the prosecutor there. He was allowed to proceed.

“Ollie Chase could not have dressed herself that way in those few intervening minutes. She had made her preparations long before that tragic hour; she was ready and waiting–waiting for what?

“Gentlemen, I will tell you. Joe Newbolt had discovered the hiding-place of his employer’s money. He had stolen it, and was preparing to depart in secrecy in the dead of night; and I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, he was not going alone!”

“Oh, what a scandalous lie!” said Mrs. Newbolt in a horrified voice which, low-pitched and groaning that it was carried to the farthest corner of that big, solemn room.

The outburst caused a little movement in the room, attended by considerable noise and some shifting of feet. Some laughed, for there are some to laugh everywhere at the most sincere emotions of the human breast. The judge rapped for order. A flush of anger mounted to his usually passive face; he turned to the sheriff with a gesture of command.

“Remove that woman from the room, Mr. Sheriff, and retain her in custody!” said he.

The sheriff came forward hastily and took Mrs. Newbolt by the arm. She stood at his touch and stretched out her hands to the judge.

“I didn’t mean to say it out loud, Judge Maxwell, but I thought it so hard, I reckon, sir, that it got away. Anybody that knows my Joe––”320

“Come on, ma’am,” the sheriff ordered.

Joe was on his feet. The sheriff’s special deputy put his hands on the prisoner’s shoulders and tried to force him down into his seat. The deputy was a little man, sandy, freckled, and frail, and his efforts, ludicrously eager, threw the court-room into a fit of unseemly laughter. The little man might as well have attempted to bend one of the oak columns which supported the court-house portico.

Judge Maxwell was properly angry now. He rapped loudly, and threatened penalties for contempt. When the mirth quieted, which it did with a suddenness almost tragic, Joe spoke. “I wish to apologize to you for mother’s words, sir,” said he, addressing the judge, inclining his head slightly to the prosecuting attorney afterward, as if to include him, upon second thought. “She was moved out of her calm and dignity by the statement of Mr. Lucas, sir, and I give you my word of honor that she’ll say no more. I’d like to have her here by me, sir, if you’d grant me that favor. You can understand, sir, that a man needs a friend at his side in an hour like this.”

Judge Maxwell’s face was losing its redness of wrath; the hard lines were melting out of it. He pondered a moment, looking with gathered brows at Joe. The little deputy had given over his struggle, and now stood with one hand twisted in the back of Joe’s coat. The sheriff kept his hold on Mrs. Newbolt’s arm. She lifted her contrite face to the judge, tears in her eyes.

“Very well,” said the judge, “the court will accept your apology, and hold you responsible for her future behavior. Madam, resume your seat, and do not interrupt the prosecuting attorney again.”

Mrs. Newbolt justified Joe’s plea by sitting quietly while the prosecutor continued. But her interruption had acted like an explosion in the train of his ideas; he was so much321disconcerted by it that he finished rather tamely, reserving his force, as people understood, for his closing speech.

Hammer rose in consequence, and plunged into the effort of his life. He painted the character of Isom Chase in horrible guise; he pointed out his narrowness, his wickedness, his cruelty, his quickness to lift his hand. He wept and he sobbed, and splashed tears all around him.

It was one of the most satisfying pieces of public oratory ever heard in Shelbyville, from the standpoint of sentiment, and the view of the unschooled. But as a legal and logical argument it was as foolish and futile as Hammer’s own fat tears. He kept it up for an hour, and he might have gone on for another if his tears had not given out. Without tears, Hammer’s eloquence dwindled and his oratory dried.

Mrs. Newbolt blessed him in her heart, and the irresponsible and vacillating public wiped its cheeks clean of its tears and settled down to have its emotions warped the other way. Everybody said that Hammer had done well. He had made a fine effort, it showed what they had contended for all along, that Hammer had it naturally in him, and was bound to land in congress yet.

When the prosecutor resumed for the last word he seemed to be in a vicious temper. He seemed to be prompted by motives of revenge, rather than justice. If he had been a near relative of the deceased, under the obligation of exacting life for life with his own hands, he could not have shown more vindictive personal resentment against the accused. He reverted to Joe’s reservation in his testimony.

“There is no question in my mind, gentlemen of the jury,” said he, “that the silence behind which this defendant hides is the silence of guilt, and that silence brands him blacker than any confession that his tongue could make.

“‘Words passed between us,’ and ‘it was between him and322me.’ That, gentlemen of the jury, is the explanation this defendant gives, the only, the weak, the obviously dishonest explanation, that he ever has offered, or that the kindly admonishment of this court could draw from his lips. Guilt sits on his face; every line of his base countenance is a confession; every brutal snarl from his reluctant tongue is testimony of his evil heart. He was a thief, and, when he was caught, he murdered. ‘Out of his own mouth he has uttered his condemnation,’ and there is but one penalty fitting this hideous crime–the penalty of death!

“Never before has the fair name of our county been stained by such an atrocious crime; never before has there been such a conspiracy between the guilty to defeat the ends of justice in this moral and respected community. I call upon you, gentlemen of the jury, for the safety of our households and the sanctity of our hearths, to bring in your verdict of guilty under the indictment.

“It is a solemn and awful thing to stand here in the presence of the Almighty and ask the life of one of his creatures, made by Him in His own image and endowed by Him with reason and superiority above all else that moves on the earth or in the waters under it. But this man, Joe Newbolt, has debased that image and abused that reason and superiority which raises him above the beasts of the field. He has murdered a defenseless old man; he has, by that act and deed, forfeited his right to life and liberty under the law.”

The prosecutor made one of his effective pauses. There was the stillness of midnight in the crowded court-room. The sound of dashing rain was loud on the window-panes, the hoarse voice of the gray old elm which combed the wind with its high-flung branches, was like the distant groan of the sea.

In that aching silence Ollie Chase turned suddenly, as if she had heard someone call her name. She started, her white face grew whiter. But nobody seemed conscious of her323presence, except the prosecutor, who wheeled upon her and leveled his accusing finger at her where she sat.

There was the bearing of sudden and reckless impulse in his act. He surely had not meditated that bold challenge of one who had passed under his merciless hand, and was now, according to all accepted procedure, beyond his reach and his concern. But Sam Lucas did that unusual thing. He stood pointing at her, his jaw trembling as if the intensity of his passion had palsied his tongue.

“Gentlemen of the jury, what part this woman played in that dark night’s work the world may never know,” said he. “But the world is not blind, and its judgments are usually justified by time. This woman, Ollie Chase, and this defendant have conspired to hold silence between them, in what hope, to what unholy end, God alone knows. But who will believe the weak and improbable story this woman has told on the witness-stand? Who is so blind that he cannot see the stain of her infidelity and the ghastly blight of that midnight shadow upon her quaking soul?”

He turned from her abruptly. Hammer partly rose, as if to enter an objection. He seemed to reconsider it, and sat down. Ollie shrank against her mother’s shoulders, trembling. The older woman, fierce as a dragon in the sudden focus of the crowd’s attention and eyes, fixed in one shifting sweep from the prosecuting attorney to her daughter, put her arm about Ollie and comforted her with whispered words.

The prosecutor proceeded, solemnly:

“I tell you, gentlemen, that these two people, Ollie Chase and Joseph Newbolt, alone in that house that night, alone in that house for two days before this tragedy darkened it, before the blood of gray old Isom Chase ran down upon its threshold, these two conspired in their guilt to hide the truth.324

“If this woman would open her lips, if this woman would break the seal of this guilty compact and speak, the mystery of this case would dissolve, and the heroic romance which this defendant is trying to put over the squalid facts of his guilt would turn out only a sordid story of midnight lust and robbery. If conscience would trouble this woman to speak, gentlemen of the jury–but she has no conscience, and she has no heart!”

He turned again to Ollie, savagely; her mother covered her with her arm, as if to protect her from a blow.

“There she cowers in her guilty silence, in what hope God alone knows, but if she would speak––”

“I will speak!” Ollie cried.

325CHAPTER XXIOLLIE SPEAKS

Ollie’s voice, low and steady in earnest determination, broke the current of his denunciation as a knife severs a straining cord. The suddenness of her declaration almost made the prosecutor reel. She was sitting up, straight and outwardly calm, pushing her cloak and other detached belongings away from her with an unconscious movement of disencumbering herself for some desperate leap.“I’ll tell everything–if you’ll let me–now,” said she, rising to her feet.She was white and cold, but steady, and sternly resolute. The prosecutor had not expected that; his challenge had been only a spectacular play for effect. Her offer to speak left him mentally groping behind himself for a support. It would have been different if he had been certain of what she desired to say. As she stood before him there, bloodless, and in such calm of outward aspect that it was almost hysterical, he did not know whether she was friend or foe.Joe had not expected it; the hundreds of spectators had not looked for that, and Hammer was as much surprised as a ponderous, barber-minded man could be. Yet he was the first, of all of them there, to get his wits in hand. The prosecutor had challenged her, and, he argued, what she had to say must be in justification of both herself and Joe. He stood up quickly, and demanded that Ollie Chase be put under oath and brought to the witness-stand.Ollie’s mother had hold of her hand, looking up into her face in great consternation, begging her to sit down and keep still. In general, people were standing, and Uncle Posen326Spratt was worming the big end of his steer-horn trumpet between shoulders of men and headgear of women to hear what he could not see.Judge Maxwell commanded order. The prosecuting attorney began to protest against the fulfilment of the very thing that, with so much feeling and earnestness, he had demanded but a minute before.“Considering this late hour in the proceedings, your honor––” he began.Judge Maxwell silenced him with a stern and reproving look.“It is never too late for justice, Mr. Prosecutor,” said he. “Let that woman come forward and be sworn.”Hammer went eagerly to the assistance of Ollie, opening the little gate in the railing for her officiously, putting his palm under her elbow in his sustaining fashion. The clerk administered the oath; Ollie dropped her hand wearily at her side.“I lied the other day,” said she, as one surrendering at the end of a hopeless defense, “and I’m tired of hiding the truth any more.”Joe Newbolt was moved by a strange feeling of mingled thankfulness and regret. Tears had started to his eyes, and were coursing down his face, unheeded and unchecked. The torture of the past days and weeks, the challenge of his honor, the doubt of his sincerity; the rough assaults of the prosecuting attorney, the palpable unfriendliness of the people–none of these things ever had drawn from him a tear. But this simple act of justice on the part of Ollie Chase moved the deep waters of his soul.His mother had taken his hand between her rough palms, and was chafing it, as if to call back its warmth and life. She was not looking at her son, for her faith had not departed from him for one moment, and would not have diminished327if they had condemned him under the accusation. Her eyes were on Ollie’s face, her lips were murmuring beneath her breath:“Thank the Lord for His justice and mercy! Thank the Lord, thank the Lord!”Ollie had settled in the witness-chair again, in the midst of her wide-skirted mourning habit, as on that other day. Joe Newbolt prayed in his heart for the mitigation of public censure, and for strength to sustain her in her hour of sacrifice.That Ollie had come forward to save him–unasked, unexpected–was like the comfort of a cloak against the wintry wind. The public believed that she was going to “own up” to it now, and to clinch the case against Joe. Some of them began to make mental calculations on the capacity of the jail yard, and to lay plans for securing passes to the hanging.Hammer stepped forward to question the witness, and the prosecuting attorney sat down, alert and ready to interpose in case things should start the wrong way. He had lost sight of justice completely, after the fixed habit of his kind, in his eagerness to advance his own prospects by securing the conviction of the accused.Ollie sat facing Judge Maxwell, who had turned in his swivel-chair; moved out of his bearing of studious concentration, which was his usual characteristic on the bench.“Now, Mrs. Chase, tell your story in your own way, and take your own time for it,” said Hammer, kindly patronizing.“I don’t want Joe to suffer for me,” she said, letting her sad eyes rest on him for a moment. “What he kept back wasn’t for his own sake. It was for mine.”“Yes; go on, Mrs. Chase,” said Hammer as she hesitated there.“Joe didn’t shoot Isom. That happened just the way he’s328said. I know all about it, for I was there. Joe didn’t know anything about that money. I’ll tell you about that, too.”“Now, your honor,” began the prosecutor complainingly, “it seems to me that the time and place for evidence of this nature has gone by. This witness has testified already, and to an entirely different set of facts. I don’t know what influences have been at work to induce her to frame up a new story, but––”“Your zeal is commendable, Mr. Prosecutor,” said the judge, “but it must not be allowed to obscure the human rights at hazard in this case. Let the witness proceed.”Ollie shuddered like one entering cold water as she let her eyes take a flight out over the crowd. Perhaps she saw something in it that appalled her, or perhaps she realized only then that she was about to expose the nakedness of her soul before the world.“Go ahead, Mrs. Chase,” prompted Hammer. “You say you know about that sack of money?”“I was taking it away with me,” said she, drawing a long breath and expelling it with an audible sigh.She seemed very tired, and she looked most hopeless, pitiable, and forlorn; still there was no wavering from the task that she had set for herself, no shrinking from its pain. “I was going to meet Curtis Morgan, the book-agent man that you’ve asked me about before. We intended to run off to the city together. Joe knew about it; he stopped me that night.”She paused again, picking at her fingers nervously.“You say that Joe stopped you–” Hammer began. She cut him off, taking up her suspended narrative without spirit, as one resumes a burden.“Yes, but let me tell you first.” She looked frankly into Judge Maxwell’s eyes.“Address the jury, Mrs. Chase,” admonished Hammer.329She turned and looked steadily into the foreman’s bearded face.“There never was a thing out of the way between me and Joe. Joe never made love to me; he never kissed me, he never seemed to want to. When Curtis Morgan came to board with us I was about ready to die, I was so tired and lonesome and starved for a kind word.“Isom was a hard man–harder than anybody knows that never worked for him. He worked me like I was only a plow or a hoe, without any feeling or any heart. Morgan and me–Mr. Morgan, he–well, we fell in love. We didn’t act right, and Joe found it out. That was the day that Mr. Morgan and I planned to run away together. He was coming back for me that night.”“You say that you and Morgan didn’t act right,” said Hammer, not satisfied with a statement that might leave the jurymen the labor of conjecture. “Do you mean to say that there were improper relations between you? that you were, in a word, unfaithful to your husband, Isom Chase?”Ollie’s pale face grew scarlet; she hung her head.“Yes,” she answered, in voice shamed and low.Her mother, shocked and astounded by this public revelation, sat as if crouching in the place where Ollie had left her. Judge Maxwell nodded encouragingly to the woman who was making her open confession.“Go on,” said he.His eyes shifted from her to Joe Newbolt, who was looking at Ollie with every evidence of acute suffering and sympathy in his face. The judge studied him intently; Joe, his attention centered on Ollie, was insensible to the scrutiny.Ollie told how she and Morgan had made their plans in the orchard that afternoon, and how she had gone to the house and prepared to carry out the compact that night, not knowing that Joe had overheard them and sent Morgan330away. She had a most attentive and appreciative audience. She spoke in a low voice, her face turned toward the jury, according to Hammer’s directions. He could not afford to have them lose one word of that belated evidence.“I knew where Isom hid his money,” said she, “and that night when I thought Joe was asleep I took up the loose board in the closet of the room where Isom and I slept and took out that little sack. There was another one like it, but I only took my share. I’d worked for it, and starved and suffered, and it was mine. I didn’t consider that I was robbing him.”“You were not,” Hammer assured her. “A wife cannot rob her husband, Mrs. Chase. And then what did you do?”“I went downstairs with that money in my hand and laid it on the kitchen table while I fixed my hat. It was dark in the kitchen, and when I was ready to go to meet Mr. Morgan in the place agreed on between us, I struck a match to find my way to the door without bumpin’ into a chair or something and making a noise that would wake up Joe.“I didn’t know he was already up and watching for me to start. He was at the door when I opened it, and he told me to light the lamp. I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want him to see me all dressed and ready to leave, and I wanted to try to slip that sack of money off the table before he saw it, too. He came in; I guess he put his hat down on the table in the dark, and it fell on top of the sack.“When he lit the lamp in a minute you couldn’t have told there was anything under the hat unless you stood in a certain place, where it showed a little under the brim. Joe told me he knew all about Morgan and me, and that he’d sent him away. He said it was wrong for me to leave Isom; he said that Isom was better than Morgan, bad as he was.“I flared up and got mad at Joe, but he was gentle and kind, and talked to me and showed me where I was wrong.331I’d kind of tried to make love to Joe a little before that,” she confessed, her face flushing hotly again, “before Mr. Morgan came, that was. I’ll tell you this so you’ll know that there was nothing out of the way between me and Joe.“Joe didn’t seem to understand such things. He was nothing but a boy till the night Isom was killed. He didn’t take me up on it like Morgan did. I know it was wrong in me; but Isom drove me to it, and I’ve suffered for it–more than I can ever make you understand.”She appealed to the judge in her manner of saying that; appealed as for the absolution which she had earned by a cruel penance. He nodded kindly, his face very grave.“Yes, Mrs. Chase,” said Hammer. “And then what did you do next?”“Well, while Joe was persuading me to go back to bed I put my arms around his neck. I wanted to smooth it over with him, so he’d go to bed first and I could take the money and put it back, for one thing; and because I really was sorry for what I’d done, and was ashamed of it, and felt lonesome and kicked out, and like nobody didn’t care.“Isom came in and saw us standing there that way, with my hands on Joe’s shoulders, and he rushed up and said: ‘I’ll kill you!’ He said we was standing there hugging each other, and that we’d disgraced him; but that wasn’t so. It was all my fault, but Joe didn’t tell him that.”“And what did Joe tell him, Mrs. Chase?” asked Hammer, aglow with the victory which he felt to be already in his hand. He looked with gloating triumph at the prosecuting attorney, who sat at the table twirling a pencil in his fingers, and did not lift his eyes.“Joe told Isom he was making a mistake, and then Isom ripped and swore and threatened to kill us both. He looked around for something to do it with, and he saw that sack of money under Joe’s hat. He jumped for the table and332grabbed it, and then he made for the gun. I told Joe to stop him, and Joe tried. But he was too late. The rest of it happened just like Joe’s already told you.”Ollie’s head drooped forward wearily, and her hands lay passively in her lap. It seemed that she considered the story concluded, but Hammer was not of that mind.“After Isom fell–after the gun went off and Isom fell–what did you and Joe do?” he asked.“We heard somebody coming in a minute. We didn’t know who it could be, but I was afraid. I knew if it got out on me about my start to run off with Morgan, and all the rest of it, I’d be ruined and disgraced forever.“Joe knew it too, better than I did. I didn’t have to tell him, and I never even hinted for him to do what he did. I never even thought of that. I asked him what we’d do, and he told me to go upstairs and leave him to do the talking. I went. I was coward enough to go and leave him to bear the blame. When Joe lied at the inquest to save me, I backed him up in it, and I stuck to it up till now. Maybe I was a little mad at him for coming between me and Mr. Morgan, but that was just a streak. That’s the only lie Joe’s told, and you can see he never would have told that to save himself. I don’t want to see him suffer any more for me.”Ollie concluded her recital in the same low, dragging and spiritless voice in which she had begun it. Conscience whipped her through, but it could not make her unafraid. Hammer turned to the prosecutor with questioning eyes. Lucas announced that he did not desire to cross-examine the witness, and the judge dismissed her.Ollie went back to her mother. No demonstration accompanied her passing, but a great sigh sounded over the room as the tenseness of the listening strain relaxed, and the fulness of satisfaction came in its place.Mrs. Newbolt still clung to her son’s hand. She nodded333at the prosecuting attorney with glowing eyes, as if glorying over him in the moment of his defeat. Alice Price smiled joyously, and leaned back from her posture of concentration. The colonel whispered to her, bringing the palms of his hands together in silent but expressive applause. The prosecuting attorney stood.“Your honor–” he began, but Judge Maxwell, lifting his head from the reflecting pose into which he had fallen when Ollie left the stand, silenced him with an impatient gesture.“One moment, Mr. Prosecutor,” said he.The prosecutor flushed, and sat down in ruffled dignity.“I merely wanted to make a motion for dismissal,” said he, sarcastically, as if it was only the merest incidental in the day’s proceedings.“That is not the procedure,” said the judge. “The state owes it to this defendant to absolve him before the public of the obloquy of this unfounded and cruel accusation.”“Vindication is what we demand, your honor,” said Hammer grandly; “vindication before the world!”He spread his arms wide, as if the world stood before him, fat and big of girth like himself, and he meant to embrace it with the next breath.“You shall have it, Mr. Hammer,” said the judge. He turned to the jury. “Gentlemen of the jury, this case has come to a sudden and unexpected end. The state’s case, prosecuted with such worthy energy and honorable intention, has collapsed. Your one duty now, gentlemen, is to return a verdict of not guilty. Will it be necessary for you to retire to the jury room?”The jurymen had been exchanging glances. Now the foreman rose, tall and solemn, with beard upon his breast.“Your honor, it will not be necessary for the jury to retire,” said he. “We are ready to return our verdict.”334According to the form, the foreman wrote out the verdict on the blank provided by statute; he stood with his fellows while the clerk of the court read it aloud:“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.”The judge looked down at Joe, who had turned to his mother, smiling through his tears.“You are free, God bless you!” said he.When a judge says so much more upon the bench than precedent, form, and custom prescribe for him to say; when he puts down the hard mask of the law and discovers his human face behind it, and his human heart moving his warm, human blood; when a judge on the bench does that, what can be expected of the unsanctified mob in front of him?It was said by many that Captain Taylor led the applause himself, but there were others who claimed that distinction for Colonel Price. No matter.While the house did not rise as one man–for in every house there are old joints and young ones, which do not unlimber with the same degree of alacrity, no matter what the incitement–it got to its feet in surprising order, with a great tossing of arms and waving of hats and coats. In the midst of this glad turmoil stood Uncle Posen Spratt, head and shoulders above the crowd, mounted on a bench, his steer’s horn ear-trumpet to his whiskered lips, like an Israelitish priest, blowing his famous fox-hound blast, which had been heard five miles on a still autumn night.Less than half an hour before, the public would have attended Joe Newbolt’s hanging with all the pleasurable and satisfactory thrills which men draw from such melancholy events. Now it was clamoring to lift him to its shoulders and bear him in triumph through the town.Judge Maxwell smiled, and adjourned court, which order nobody but his clerk heard, and let them have their noisy way. When the people saw him come down from the bench335they quieted, not understanding his purpose; and when he reached out his hand to Joe, who rose to meet him, silence settled over the house. Judge Maxwell put his arm around Joe’s shoulder in fatherly way while he shook hands with Mrs. Newbolt. What he said, nobody but those within the bar heard, but he gave Joe’s back an expressive slap of approval as he turned to the prosecuting attorney.People rushed forward with the suddenness of water released, to shake hands with Joe when they understood that the court was in adjournment. They crowded inside the rail, almost overwhelming him, exclaiming in loud terms of admiration, addressing him familiarly, to his excessive embarrassment, pressing upon him their assurances that they knew, all the time, that he didn’t do it, and that he would come out of it with head and tail both up, as he had come through.Men who would have passed him yesterday without a second thought, and who would no more have given their hands to him on the footing of equality–unless they had chanced to be running for office–than they would have thrust them into the fire, now stood there smiling and jostling and waiting their turns to reach him, all of them chattering and mouthing and nodding heads until one would have thought that each of them was a prophet, and had predicted this very thing.The old generals, colonels, majors, and captains–that was the lowest rank in Shelbyville–and the noncommissioned substantial first citizens of the county, were shaking hands among themselves, and nodding and smiling, full of the fine feeling of that moment. It was a triumph of chivalry, they said; they had witnessed the renaissance of the old spirit, the passing of which, and the dying out and dwindling of it in the rising generation, they had so long and lamentably deplored.There, before their eyes, they had seen this uncouth grub transformed into a glorious and noble thing, and the only336discord in the miraculous harmony of it was the deep-lying regret that it was not a son of Shelbyville who had thus proved himself a man. And then the colonels and others broke off their self-felicitation to join the forward mob in the front of the room, and press their congratulations upon Joe.Joe, embarrassed and awkward, tried to be genial, but hardly succeeded in being civil, for his heart was not with them in what he felt to be nothing but a cheap emotion. He was looking over their heads, and peering between their shoulders, watching the progress of a little red feather in a Highland bonnet, which was making its way toward him through the confusion like a bold pennant upon the crest of battle. Joe pushed through the wedging mass of people around, and went to the bar to meet her.In the time of his distress, these who now clamored around him with professions of friendliness had not held up a hand to sustain him, nor given him one good word to shore up his sinking soul. But there was one who had known and understood; one whose faith had held him up to the heights of honor, and his soul stood in his eyes to greet her as he waited for her to come. He did not know what he would say when hand touched hand, but he felt that he could fall down upon his knees as a subject sinks before a queen.Behind him he heard his mother’s voice, thanking the people who offered their congratulations. It was a great day for her when the foremost citizens of the county came forward, their hats in their hands, to pay their respects to her Joe. She felt that he was rising up to his place at last, and coming into his own.Joe heard his mother’s voice, but it was sound to him now without words. Alice was coming. She was now just a little way beyond the reach of his arm, and her presence filled the world.The people had their quick eyes on Alice, also, and they337fell apart to let her pass, the flame of a new expectation in their keen faces. After yesterday’s strange act, which seemed so prophetic of today’s climax in the case, what was she going to do? Joe wondered in his heart with them; he trembled in his eagerness to know.She was now at the last row of benches, not five feet distant from him, where she stood a second, while she looked up into his face and smiled, lifting her hand in a little expressive gesture. Then she turned aside to the place where Ollie Chase sat, shame-stricken and stunned, beside her mother.The women who had been sitting near Ollie had withdrawn from her, as if she had become unclean with her confession. And now, as Alice approached, Ollie’s mother gave her a hard, resentful look, and put her arm about her daughter as if to protect her from any physical indignities which Alice might be bent on offering.Ollie shrank against her mother, her hair bright above her somber garb, as if it was the one spot in her where any of the sunshine of her past remained. Alice went to her with determined directness. She bent over her, and took her by the hand.“Thank you! You’re the bravest woman in the world!” she said.Ollie looked up, wonder and disbelief struggling against the pathetic hopelessness in her eyes. Alice bent lower. She kissed the young widow’s pale forehead.Joe was ashamed that he had forgotten Ollie. He saw tears come into Ollie’s eyes as she clung closer to Alice’s hand, and he heard the shocked gasping of women, and the grunts of men, and the stirring murmur of surprise which shook the crowd. He opened the little gate in the railing and went out.“You didn’t have to do that for me, Ollie,” said he, kindly; “I could have got on, somehow, without that.”338“Both of you–” said Ollie, a sob shaking her breath; “it was for both of you!”There was a churchlike stillness around them. Colonel Price had advanced, and now stood near the little group, a look of understanding in his kind old face. Ollie mastered her sudden gust of weeping, and shook her disordered hair back from her forehead, a defiant light in her eyes.“I don’t care now, I don’t care whatanybodysays!” said she.Her mother glanced around with the fire of battle in her eyes. In that look she defied the public, and uttered her contempt for its valuation and opinion. Alice Price had lifted her crushed and broken daughter up. She had taken her by the hand, and she had kissed her, to show the world that she did not hold her as one defiled. Judge Maxwell and all of them had seen her do it. She had given Ollie absolution before all men.Ollie drew her cloak around her shoulders and rose to her feet.“Remember that; for both of you, for one as much as the other,” said she, looking into Alice’s eyes. “Come on, Mother; we’ll go home now.”Ollie walked out of the court-room with her head up, looking the world in the face. In place of the mark of the beast on her forehead, she was carrying the cool benediction of a virtuous kiss. Joe and Alice stood looking after her until she reached the door; even the most careless there waited her exit as if it was part of some solemn ceremony. When she had passed out of sight beyond the door, the crowd moved suddenly and noisily after her. For the public, the show was over.Alice looked up into Joe’s face. There was uncertainty in his eyes still, for he was no wiser than those in their generations before him who had failed to read a woman’s339heart. Alice saw that cloud hovering before the sun of his felicity. She lifted her hands and gave them to him, as one restoring to its owner something that cannot be denied.Face to face for a moment they stood thus, hands clasped in hands. For them the world was empty of prying eyes, wondering minds, impertinent faces. For a moment they were alone.The jurors had come out of the box, and were following the crowd. Hammer was gathering up his books and papers, Judge Maxwell and the prosecuting attorney were talking with Mrs. Newbolt. The sheriff was waiting near the bar, as if he had some duty yet before him to discharge. A smile had come over Colonel Price’s face, where it spread like a benediction as Joe and Alice turned to enter the world again.“I want to shake hands with you, Joe,” said the sheriff, “and wish you good luck. I always knowed you was as innercent as a child.”Joe obliged him, and thanked him for his expression, but there were things in the past which were not so easily wiped from the memory–especially a chafed ring around his left wrist, where the sheriff’s iron had galled him when he had fretted against it during the tense moments of those past days.Sam Lucas offered Joe his hand.“No hard feeling, Joe, I hope?” said he.“Well, not in particular–oh, well, you were only doing your duty, as you saw it,” said Joe.“You could have saved the county a lot of money, and yourself and your friends a lot of trouble and anxiety, if you’d told us all about this thing at the beginning,” complained Lucas, with lingering severity.“As for that–” began Colonel Price.“You knew it, Miss Price,” Lucas cut in. “Why didn’t you make him tell?”340“No,” said Alice, quietly, “I didn’t know, Mr. Lucas. I only believed in him. Besides that, there are some things that you can’tmakea gentleman tell!”“Just so,” said Judge Maxwell, coming down from the bench with his books under his arm.“Bless your heart, honey,” said Mrs. Newbolt, touching Alice’s hair with gentle, almost reverent hand, “you knew him better than his old mother did!”Colonel Price bowed ceremoniously to Mrs. Newbolt.“I want you and Joe to come home with us for some refreshment,” said he, “after which the boy and I must have a long, long talk. Mr. Hammer, sir,” said he, giving that astonished lawyer his hand, “I beg the honor of shaking hands with a rising gentleman, sir!”

Ollie’s voice, low and steady in earnest determination, broke the current of his denunciation as a knife severs a straining cord. The suddenness of her declaration almost made the prosecutor reel. She was sitting up, straight and outwardly calm, pushing her cloak and other detached belongings away from her with an unconscious movement of disencumbering herself for some desperate leap.

“I’ll tell everything–if you’ll let me–now,” said she, rising to her feet.

She was white and cold, but steady, and sternly resolute. The prosecutor had not expected that; his challenge had been only a spectacular play for effect. Her offer to speak left him mentally groping behind himself for a support. It would have been different if he had been certain of what she desired to say. As she stood before him there, bloodless, and in such calm of outward aspect that it was almost hysterical, he did not know whether she was friend or foe.

Joe had not expected it; the hundreds of spectators had not looked for that, and Hammer was as much surprised as a ponderous, barber-minded man could be. Yet he was the first, of all of them there, to get his wits in hand. The prosecutor had challenged her, and, he argued, what she had to say must be in justification of both herself and Joe. He stood up quickly, and demanded that Ollie Chase be put under oath and brought to the witness-stand.

Ollie’s mother had hold of her hand, looking up into her face in great consternation, begging her to sit down and keep still. In general, people were standing, and Uncle Posen326Spratt was worming the big end of his steer-horn trumpet between shoulders of men and headgear of women to hear what he could not see.

Judge Maxwell commanded order. The prosecuting attorney began to protest against the fulfilment of the very thing that, with so much feeling and earnestness, he had demanded but a minute before.

“Considering this late hour in the proceedings, your honor––” he began.

Judge Maxwell silenced him with a stern and reproving look.

“It is never too late for justice, Mr. Prosecutor,” said he. “Let that woman come forward and be sworn.”

Hammer went eagerly to the assistance of Ollie, opening the little gate in the railing for her officiously, putting his palm under her elbow in his sustaining fashion. The clerk administered the oath; Ollie dropped her hand wearily at her side.

“I lied the other day,” said she, as one surrendering at the end of a hopeless defense, “and I’m tired of hiding the truth any more.”

Joe Newbolt was moved by a strange feeling of mingled thankfulness and regret. Tears had started to his eyes, and were coursing down his face, unheeded and unchecked. The torture of the past days and weeks, the challenge of his honor, the doubt of his sincerity; the rough assaults of the prosecuting attorney, the palpable unfriendliness of the people–none of these things ever had drawn from him a tear. But this simple act of justice on the part of Ollie Chase moved the deep waters of his soul.

His mother had taken his hand between her rough palms, and was chafing it, as if to call back its warmth and life. She was not looking at her son, for her faith had not departed from him for one moment, and would not have diminished327if they had condemned him under the accusation. Her eyes were on Ollie’s face, her lips were murmuring beneath her breath:

“Thank the Lord for His justice and mercy! Thank the Lord, thank the Lord!”

Ollie had settled in the witness-chair again, in the midst of her wide-skirted mourning habit, as on that other day. Joe Newbolt prayed in his heart for the mitigation of public censure, and for strength to sustain her in her hour of sacrifice.

That Ollie had come forward to save him–unasked, unexpected–was like the comfort of a cloak against the wintry wind. The public believed that she was going to “own up” to it now, and to clinch the case against Joe. Some of them began to make mental calculations on the capacity of the jail yard, and to lay plans for securing passes to the hanging.

Hammer stepped forward to question the witness, and the prosecuting attorney sat down, alert and ready to interpose in case things should start the wrong way. He had lost sight of justice completely, after the fixed habit of his kind, in his eagerness to advance his own prospects by securing the conviction of the accused.

Ollie sat facing Judge Maxwell, who had turned in his swivel-chair; moved out of his bearing of studious concentration, which was his usual characteristic on the bench.

“Now, Mrs. Chase, tell your story in your own way, and take your own time for it,” said Hammer, kindly patronizing.

“I don’t want Joe to suffer for me,” she said, letting her sad eyes rest on him for a moment. “What he kept back wasn’t for his own sake. It was for mine.”

“Yes; go on, Mrs. Chase,” said Hammer as she hesitated there.

“Joe didn’t shoot Isom. That happened just the way he’s328said. I know all about it, for I was there. Joe didn’t know anything about that money. I’ll tell you about that, too.”

“Now, your honor,” began the prosecutor complainingly, “it seems to me that the time and place for evidence of this nature has gone by. This witness has testified already, and to an entirely different set of facts. I don’t know what influences have been at work to induce her to frame up a new story, but––”

“Your zeal is commendable, Mr. Prosecutor,” said the judge, “but it must not be allowed to obscure the human rights at hazard in this case. Let the witness proceed.”

Ollie shuddered like one entering cold water as she let her eyes take a flight out over the crowd. Perhaps she saw something in it that appalled her, or perhaps she realized only then that she was about to expose the nakedness of her soul before the world.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Chase,” prompted Hammer. “You say you know about that sack of money?”

“I was taking it away with me,” said she, drawing a long breath and expelling it with an audible sigh.

She seemed very tired, and she looked most hopeless, pitiable, and forlorn; still there was no wavering from the task that she had set for herself, no shrinking from its pain. “I was going to meet Curtis Morgan, the book-agent man that you’ve asked me about before. We intended to run off to the city together. Joe knew about it; he stopped me that night.”

She paused again, picking at her fingers nervously.

“You say that Joe stopped you–” Hammer began. She cut him off, taking up her suspended narrative without spirit, as one resumes a burden.

“Yes, but let me tell you first.” She looked frankly into Judge Maxwell’s eyes.

“Address the jury, Mrs. Chase,” admonished Hammer.329She turned and looked steadily into the foreman’s bearded face.

“There never was a thing out of the way between me and Joe. Joe never made love to me; he never kissed me, he never seemed to want to. When Curtis Morgan came to board with us I was about ready to die, I was so tired and lonesome and starved for a kind word.

“Isom was a hard man–harder than anybody knows that never worked for him. He worked me like I was only a plow or a hoe, without any feeling or any heart. Morgan and me–Mr. Morgan, he–well, we fell in love. We didn’t act right, and Joe found it out. That was the day that Mr. Morgan and I planned to run away together. He was coming back for me that night.”

“You say that you and Morgan didn’t act right,” said Hammer, not satisfied with a statement that might leave the jurymen the labor of conjecture. “Do you mean to say that there were improper relations between you? that you were, in a word, unfaithful to your husband, Isom Chase?”

Ollie’s pale face grew scarlet; she hung her head.

“Yes,” she answered, in voice shamed and low.

Her mother, shocked and astounded by this public revelation, sat as if crouching in the place where Ollie had left her. Judge Maxwell nodded encouragingly to the woman who was making her open confession.

“Go on,” said he.

His eyes shifted from her to Joe Newbolt, who was looking at Ollie with every evidence of acute suffering and sympathy in his face. The judge studied him intently; Joe, his attention centered on Ollie, was insensible to the scrutiny.

Ollie told how she and Morgan had made their plans in the orchard that afternoon, and how she had gone to the house and prepared to carry out the compact that night, not knowing that Joe had overheard them and sent Morgan330away. She had a most attentive and appreciative audience. She spoke in a low voice, her face turned toward the jury, according to Hammer’s directions. He could not afford to have them lose one word of that belated evidence.

“I knew where Isom hid his money,” said she, “and that night when I thought Joe was asleep I took up the loose board in the closet of the room where Isom and I slept and took out that little sack. There was another one like it, but I only took my share. I’d worked for it, and starved and suffered, and it was mine. I didn’t consider that I was robbing him.”

“You were not,” Hammer assured her. “A wife cannot rob her husband, Mrs. Chase. And then what did you do?”

“I went downstairs with that money in my hand and laid it on the kitchen table while I fixed my hat. It was dark in the kitchen, and when I was ready to go to meet Mr. Morgan in the place agreed on between us, I struck a match to find my way to the door without bumpin’ into a chair or something and making a noise that would wake up Joe.

“I didn’t know he was already up and watching for me to start. He was at the door when I opened it, and he told me to light the lamp. I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want him to see me all dressed and ready to leave, and I wanted to try to slip that sack of money off the table before he saw it, too. He came in; I guess he put his hat down on the table in the dark, and it fell on top of the sack.

“When he lit the lamp in a minute you couldn’t have told there was anything under the hat unless you stood in a certain place, where it showed a little under the brim. Joe told me he knew all about Morgan and me, and that he’d sent him away. He said it was wrong for me to leave Isom; he said that Isom was better than Morgan, bad as he was.

“I flared up and got mad at Joe, but he was gentle and kind, and talked to me and showed me where I was wrong.331I’d kind of tried to make love to Joe a little before that,” she confessed, her face flushing hotly again, “before Mr. Morgan came, that was. I’ll tell you this so you’ll know that there was nothing out of the way between me and Joe.

“Joe didn’t seem to understand such things. He was nothing but a boy till the night Isom was killed. He didn’t take me up on it like Morgan did. I know it was wrong in me; but Isom drove me to it, and I’ve suffered for it–more than I can ever make you understand.”

She appealed to the judge in her manner of saying that; appealed as for the absolution which she had earned by a cruel penance. He nodded kindly, his face very grave.

“Yes, Mrs. Chase,” said Hammer. “And then what did you do next?”

“Well, while Joe was persuading me to go back to bed I put my arms around his neck. I wanted to smooth it over with him, so he’d go to bed first and I could take the money and put it back, for one thing; and because I really was sorry for what I’d done, and was ashamed of it, and felt lonesome and kicked out, and like nobody didn’t care.

“Isom came in and saw us standing there that way, with my hands on Joe’s shoulders, and he rushed up and said: ‘I’ll kill you!’ He said we was standing there hugging each other, and that we’d disgraced him; but that wasn’t so. It was all my fault, but Joe didn’t tell him that.”

“And what did Joe tell him, Mrs. Chase?” asked Hammer, aglow with the victory which he felt to be already in his hand. He looked with gloating triumph at the prosecuting attorney, who sat at the table twirling a pencil in his fingers, and did not lift his eyes.

“Joe told Isom he was making a mistake, and then Isom ripped and swore and threatened to kill us both. He looked around for something to do it with, and he saw that sack of money under Joe’s hat. He jumped for the table and332grabbed it, and then he made for the gun. I told Joe to stop him, and Joe tried. But he was too late. The rest of it happened just like Joe’s already told you.”

Ollie’s head drooped forward wearily, and her hands lay passively in her lap. It seemed that she considered the story concluded, but Hammer was not of that mind.

“After Isom fell–after the gun went off and Isom fell–what did you and Joe do?” he asked.

“We heard somebody coming in a minute. We didn’t know who it could be, but I was afraid. I knew if it got out on me about my start to run off with Morgan, and all the rest of it, I’d be ruined and disgraced forever.

“Joe knew it too, better than I did. I didn’t have to tell him, and I never even hinted for him to do what he did. I never even thought of that. I asked him what we’d do, and he told me to go upstairs and leave him to do the talking. I went. I was coward enough to go and leave him to bear the blame. When Joe lied at the inquest to save me, I backed him up in it, and I stuck to it up till now. Maybe I was a little mad at him for coming between me and Mr. Morgan, but that was just a streak. That’s the only lie Joe’s told, and you can see he never would have told that to save himself. I don’t want to see him suffer any more for me.”

Ollie concluded her recital in the same low, dragging and spiritless voice in which she had begun it. Conscience whipped her through, but it could not make her unafraid. Hammer turned to the prosecutor with questioning eyes. Lucas announced that he did not desire to cross-examine the witness, and the judge dismissed her.

Ollie went back to her mother. No demonstration accompanied her passing, but a great sigh sounded over the room as the tenseness of the listening strain relaxed, and the fulness of satisfaction came in its place.

Mrs. Newbolt still clung to her son’s hand. She nodded333at the prosecuting attorney with glowing eyes, as if glorying over him in the moment of his defeat. Alice Price smiled joyously, and leaned back from her posture of concentration. The colonel whispered to her, bringing the palms of his hands together in silent but expressive applause. The prosecuting attorney stood.

“Your honor–” he began, but Judge Maxwell, lifting his head from the reflecting pose into which he had fallen when Ollie left the stand, silenced him with an impatient gesture.

“One moment, Mr. Prosecutor,” said he.

The prosecutor flushed, and sat down in ruffled dignity.

“I merely wanted to make a motion for dismissal,” said he, sarcastically, as if it was only the merest incidental in the day’s proceedings.

“That is not the procedure,” said the judge. “The state owes it to this defendant to absolve him before the public of the obloquy of this unfounded and cruel accusation.”

“Vindication is what we demand, your honor,” said Hammer grandly; “vindication before the world!”

He spread his arms wide, as if the world stood before him, fat and big of girth like himself, and he meant to embrace it with the next breath.

“You shall have it, Mr. Hammer,” said the judge. He turned to the jury. “Gentlemen of the jury, this case has come to a sudden and unexpected end. The state’s case, prosecuted with such worthy energy and honorable intention, has collapsed. Your one duty now, gentlemen, is to return a verdict of not guilty. Will it be necessary for you to retire to the jury room?”

The jurymen had been exchanging glances. Now the foreman rose, tall and solemn, with beard upon his breast.

“Your honor, it will not be necessary for the jury to retire,” said he. “We are ready to return our verdict.”334

According to the form, the foreman wrote out the verdict on the blank provided by statute; he stood with his fellows while the clerk of the court read it aloud:

“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.”

The judge looked down at Joe, who had turned to his mother, smiling through his tears.

“You are free, God bless you!” said he.

When a judge says so much more upon the bench than precedent, form, and custom prescribe for him to say; when he puts down the hard mask of the law and discovers his human face behind it, and his human heart moving his warm, human blood; when a judge on the bench does that, what can be expected of the unsanctified mob in front of him?

It was said by many that Captain Taylor led the applause himself, but there were others who claimed that distinction for Colonel Price. No matter.

While the house did not rise as one man–for in every house there are old joints and young ones, which do not unlimber with the same degree of alacrity, no matter what the incitement–it got to its feet in surprising order, with a great tossing of arms and waving of hats and coats. In the midst of this glad turmoil stood Uncle Posen Spratt, head and shoulders above the crowd, mounted on a bench, his steer’s horn ear-trumpet to his whiskered lips, like an Israelitish priest, blowing his famous fox-hound blast, which had been heard five miles on a still autumn night.

Less than half an hour before, the public would have attended Joe Newbolt’s hanging with all the pleasurable and satisfactory thrills which men draw from such melancholy events. Now it was clamoring to lift him to its shoulders and bear him in triumph through the town.

Judge Maxwell smiled, and adjourned court, which order nobody but his clerk heard, and let them have their noisy way. When the people saw him come down from the bench335they quieted, not understanding his purpose; and when he reached out his hand to Joe, who rose to meet him, silence settled over the house. Judge Maxwell put his arm around Joe’s shoulder in fatherly way while he shook hands with Mrs. Newbolt. What he said, nobody but those within the bar heard, but he gave Joe’s back an expressive slap of approval as he turned to the prosecuting attorney.

People rushed forward with the suddenness of water released, to shake hands with Joe when they understood that the court was in adjournment. They crowded inside the rail, almost overwhelming him, exclaiming in loud terms of admiration, addressing him familiarly, to his excessive embarrassment, pressing upon him their assurances that they knew, all the time, that he didn’t do it, and that he would come out of it with head and tail both up, as he had come through.

Men who would have passed him yesterday without a second thought, and who would no more have given their hands to him on the footing of equality–unless they had chanced to be running for office–than they would have thrust them into the fire, now stood there smiling and jostling and waiting their turns to reach him, all of them chattering and mouthing and nodding heads until one would have thought that each of them was a prophet, and had predicted this very thing.

The old generals, colonels, majors, and captains–that was the lowest rank in Shelbyville–and the noncommissioned substantial first citizens of the county, were shaking hands among themselves, and nodding and smiling, full of the fine feeling of that moment. It was a triumph of chivalry, they said; they had witnessed the renaissance of the old spirit, the passing of which, and the dying out and dwindling of it in the rising generation, they had so long and lamentably deplored.

There, before their eyes, they had seen this uncouth grub transformed into a glorious and noble thing, and the only336discord in the miraculous harmony of it was the deep-lying regret that it was not a son of Shelbyville who had thus proved himself a man. And then the colonels and others broke off their self-felicitation to join the forward mob in the front of the room, and press their congratulations upon Joe.

Joe, embarrassed and awkward, tried to be genial, but hardly succeeded in being civil, for his heart was not with them in what he felt to be nothing but a cheap emotion. He was looking over their heads, and peering between their shoulders, watching the progress of a little red feather in a Highland bonnet, which was making its way toward him through the confusion like a bold pennant upon the crest of battle. Joe pushed through the wedging mass of people around, and went to the bar to meet her.

In the time of his distress, these who now clamored around him with professions of friendliness had not held up a hand to sustain him, nor given him one good word to shore up his sinking soul. But there was one who had known and understood; one whose faith had held him up to the heights of honor, and his soul stood in his eyes to greet her as he waited for her to come. He did not know what he would say when hand touched hand, but he felt that he could fall down upon his knees as a subject sinks before a queen.

Behind him he heard his mother’s voice, thanking the people who offered their congratulations. It was a great day for her when the foremost citizens of the county came forward, their hats in their hands, to pay their respects to her Joe. She felt that he was rising up to his place at last, and coming into his own.

Joe heard his mother’s voice, but it was sound to him now without words. Alice was coming. She was now just a little way beyond the reach of his arm, and her presence filled the world.

The people had their quick eyes on Alice, also, and they337fell apart to let her pass, the flame of a new expectation in their keen faces. After yesterday’s strange act, which seemed so prophetic of today’s climax in the case, what was she going to do? Joe wondered in his heart with them; he trembled in his eagerness to know.

She was now at the last row of benches, not five feet distant from him, where she stood a second, while she looked up into his face and smiled, lifting her hand in a little expressive gesture. Then she turned aside to the place where Ollie Chase sat, shame-stricken and stunned, beside her mother.

The women who had been sitting near Ollie had withdrawn from her, as if she had become unclean with her confession. And now, as Alice approached, Ollie’s mother gave her a hard, resentful look, and put her arm about her daughter as if to protect her from any physical indignities which Alice might be bent on offering.

Ollie shrank against her mother, her hair bright above her somber garb, as if it was the one spot in her where any of the sunshine of her past remained. Alice went to her with determined directness. She bent over her, and took her by the hand.

“Thank you! You’re the bravest woman in the world!” she said.

Ollie looked up, wonder and disbelief struggling against the pathetic hopelessness in her eyes. Alice bent lower. She kissed the young widow’s pale forehead.

Joe was ashamed that he had forgotten Ollie. He saw tears come into Ollie’s eyes as she clung closer to Alice’s hand, and he heard the shocked gasping of women, and the grunts of men, and the stirring murmur of surprise which shook the crowd. He opened the little gate in the railing and went out.

“You didn’t have to do that for me, Ollie,” said he, kindly; “I could have got on, somehow, without that.”338

“Both of you–” said Ollie, a sob shaking her breath; “it was for both of you!”

There was a churchlike stillness around them. Colonel Price had advanced, and now stood near the little group, a look of understanding in his kind old face. Ollie mastered her sudden gust of weeping, and shook her disordered hair back from her forehead, a defiant light in her eyes.

“I don’t care now, I don’t care whatanybodysays!” said she.

Her mother glanced around with the fire of battle in her eyes. In that look she defied the public, and uttered her contempt for its valuation and opinion. Alice Price had lifted her crushed and broken daughter up. She had taken her by the hand, and she had kissed her, to show the world that she did not hold her as one defiled. Judge Maxwell and all of them had seen her do it. She had given Ollie absolution before all men.

Ollie drew her cloak around her shoulders and rose to her feet.

“Remember that; for both of you, for one as much as the other,” said she, looking into Alice’s eyes. “Come on, Mother; we’ll go home now.”

Ollie walked out of the court-room with her head up, looking the world in the face. In place of the mark of the beast on her forehead, she was carrying the cool benediction of a virtuous kiss. Joe and Alice stood looking after her until she reached the door; even the most careless there waited her exit as if it was part of some solemn ceremony. When she had passed out of sight beyond the door, the crowd moved suddenly and noisily after her. For the public, the show was over.

Alice looked up into Joe’s face. There was uncertainty in his eyes still, for he was no wiser than those in their generations before him who had failed to read a woman’s339heart. Alice saw that cloud hovering before the sun of his felicity. She lifted her hands and gave them to him, as one restoring to its owner something that cannot be denied.

Face to face for a moment they stood thus, hands clasped in hands. For them the world was empty of prying eyes, wondering minds, impertinent faces. For a moment they were alone.

The jurors had come out of the box, and were following the crowd. Hammer was gathering up his books and papers, Judge Maxwell and the prosecuting attorney were talking with Mrs. Newbolt. The sheriff was waiting near the bar, as if he had some duty yet before him to discharge. A smile had come over Colonel Price’s face, where it spread like a benediction as Joe and Alice turned to enter the world again.

“I want to shake hands with you, Joe,” said the sheriff, “and wish you good luck. I always knowed you was as innercent as a child.”

Joe obliged him, and thanked him for his expression, but there were things in the past which were not so easily wiped from the memory–especially a chafed ring around his left wrist, where the sheriff’s iron had galled him when he had fretted against it during the tense moments of those past days.

Sam Lucas offered Joe his hand.

“No hard feeling, Joe, I hope?” said he.

“Well, not in particular–oh, well, you were only doing your duty, as you saw it,” said Joe.

“You could have saved the county a lot of money, and yourself and your friends a lot of trouble and anxiety, if you’d told us all about this thing at the beginning,” complained Lucas, with lingering severity.

“As for that–” began Colonel Price.

“You knew it, Miss Price,” Lucas cut in. “Why didn’t you make him tell?”340

“No,” said Alice, quietly, “I didn’t know, Mr. Lucas. I only believed in him. Besides that, there are some things that you can’tmakea gentleman tell!”

“Just so,” said Judge Maxwell, coming down from the bench with his books under his arm.

“Bless your heart, honey,” said Mrs. Newbolt, touching Alice’s hair with gentle, almost reverent hand, “you knew him better than his old mother did!”

Colonel Price bowed ceremoniously to Mrs. Newbolt.

“I want you and Joe to come home with us for some refreshment,” said he, “after which the boy and I must have a long, long talk. Mr. Hammer, sir,” said he, giving that astonished lawyer his hand, “I beg the honor of shaking hands with a rising gentleman, sir!”

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