The Bondboy Page 23

  “It will be a terrible thing for his mother if they don’t believe him,” said she.

  “We’ll do all that he’ll allow us to do for him, we can’t do any more. It’s a gloomy outlook, a gloomy case all through. It was a bad piece of business when that mountain woman bound him out to old Isom Chase, to take his kicks and curses and live on starvation rations. He’s the last boy in the world that you’d conceive of being bound out; he don’t fit the case at all.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” said she, reflectively.

  “But don’t let the melancholy thing settle on you and disturb you, child. He’ll get out of it–or he’ll not–one way or the other, I reckon. It isn’t a thing for you to take to heart and worry over. I never should have taken you to that gloomy old jail to see him, at all.”

  “I can’t forget him there–I’ll always see him there!” she shuddered. “He’s above them all–they’ll never understand him, never in this world!”

  She got up, her hair hanging upon her shoulders, and left him abruptly, as if she had discovered something that lay in her heart. Colonel Price sat looking after her, his back very straight, his hand upon his knee.

  “Well!” said he. Then, after a long ruminative spell: “Well!”

  That same hour Hammer was laboring with his client in the jail, as he had labored fruitlessly before, in an endeavor to induce him to impart to him the thing that he had concealed at the coroner’s inquest into Isom Chase’s death. Hammer assured him that it would not pass beyond him in case that it had no value in establishing his innocence.

  “Mr. Hammer, sir,” said Joe, with unbending dignity and firmness, “if the information you ask of me was mine to give, freely and honorably, I’d give it. You can see that. Maybe something will turn up between now and Monday that will make a change, but if not, you’ll have to do the best you can for me the way it stands. Maybe I oughtn’t expect you to go into the court and defend me, seeing that I can’t help you any more than I’m doing. If you feel that you’d better drop out of the case, you’re free to do it, without any hard feelings on my part, sir.”

  Hammer had no intention of dropping the case, hopeless as he felt the defense to be. Even defeat would be glorious, and loss profitable, for his connection with the defense would sound his name from one end of the state to the other.

  “I wouldn’t desert you in the hour of your need, Joe, for anything they could name,” said Hammer, with significant suggestion.

  His manner, more than his words, carried the impression that they had named sums, recognizing in him an insuperable barrier to the state’s case, but that he had put his tempters aside with high-born scorn.

  “Thank you,” said Joe.

  “But if Missis Chase was mixed up in it any way, I want you to tell me, Joe,” he pressed.

  Joe said nothing. He looked as stiff and hard as one of the iron hitching-posts in front of the court-house, thought Hammer, the side of his face turned to the lawyer, who measured it with quick eyes.

  “Was she, Joe?” whispered Hammer, leaning forward, his face close to the bars.

  “The coroner asked me that,” replied Joe, harshly.

  This unyielding quality of his client was baffling to Hammer, who was of the opinion that a good fatherly kick might break the crust of his reserve. Hammer had guessed the answer according to his own thick reasoning, and not very pellucid morals.

  “Well, if you take the stand, Joe, they’ll make you tell it then,” Hammer warned him. “You’d better tell me in advance, so I can advise you how much to say.”

  “I’ll have to get on somehow without your advice, thank you sir, Mr. Hammer, when it comes to how much to say,” said Joe.

  “There’s not many lawyers–and I’ll tell you that right now in a perfectly plain and friendly way–that’d go ahead with your case under the conditions,” said Hammer. “But as I told you, I’ll stick to you and see you through. I wash my hands of any blame for the case, Joe, if it don’t turn out exactly the way you expect.”

  Joe saw him leave without regret, for Hammer’s insistence seemed to him inexcusably vulgar. All men could not be like him, reflected Joe, his hope leaping forward to Judge Maxwell, whom he must soon confront.

  Joe tossed the night through with his longing for Alice, which gnawed him like hunger and would not yield to sleep, for in his dreams his heart went out after her; he heard her voice caressing his name. He woke with the feeling that he must put the thought of Alice away from him, and frame in his mind what he should say when it came his turn to stand before Judge Maxwell and tell his story. If by some hinted thing, some shade of speech, some qualification which a gentleman would grasp and understand, he might convey his reason to the judge, he felt that he must come clear.

  He pondered it a long time, and the face of the judge rose before him, and the eyes were brown and the hair in soft wavelets above a white forehead, and Alice stood in judgment over him. So it always ended; it was before Alice that he must plead and justify himself. She was his judge, his jury, and his world.

  It was mid-afternoon when Mrs. Newbolt arrived for her last visit before the trial. She came down to his door in her somber dress, tall, bony and severe, thinner of face herself than she had been before, her eyes bright with the affection for her boy which her tongue never put into words. Her shoes were muddy, and the hem of her skirt draggled, for, high as she had held it in her heavy tramp, it had become splashed by the pools in the soft highway.

  “Mother, you shouldn’t have come today over the bad roads,” said Joe with affectionate reproof.

  “Lands, what’s a little mud!” said she, putting down a small bundle which she bore. “Well, it’ll be froze up by tomorrow, I reckon, it’s turnin’ sharp and cold.”

  She looked at Joe anxiously, every shadow in his worn face carving its counterpart in her heart. There was no smile of gladness on her lips, for smiles had been so long apart from her life that the nerves which commanded them had grown stiff and hard.

  “Yes,” said Joe, taking up her last words, “winter will be here in a little while now. I’ll be out then, Mother, to lay in wood for you. It won’t be long now.”

  “Lord bless you, son!” said she, the words catching in her throat, tears rising to her eyes and standing so heavy that she must wipe them away.

  “It will all be settled next week,” Joe told her confidently.

  “I hope they won’t put it off no more,” said she wearily.

  “No; Hammer says they’re sure to go ahead this time.”

  “Ollie drove over yesterday evening and brought your things from Isom’s,” said she, lifting the bundle from the floor, forcing it to him between the bars. “I brought you a couple of clean shirts, for I knew you’d want one for tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Mother, I’m glad you brought them,” said Joe.

  “Ollie, she said she never would make you put in the rest of your time there if she had anything to say about it. But she said if Judge Little got them letters of administration he was after she expected he’d try to hold us to it, from what he said.”

  “No matter, Mother.”

  “And Ollie said if she ever did come into Isom’s property she’d make us a deed to our place.”

  Mrs. Newbolt’s face bore a little gleam of hope when she told him this. Joe looked at her kindly.

  “She could afford to, Mother,” said he, “it was paid for in interest on that loan to Isom.”

  “But Isom, he never would ’a’ give in to that,” said she. “Your pap he paid twelve per cent interest on that loan for sixteen years.”

  “I figured it all up, Mother,” said he.

  There was nothing for her to sit on in the corridor; she stood holding to the bars to take some of the weight from her tired feet.

  “I don’t want to hurry you off, Mother,” said Joe, “but I hate to see you standing there all tired out. If the sheriff was a gentleman he’d fetch you a chair. I don’t suppose there’d be any use in asking him.”

 
; “Never mind, Joe, it takes more than a little walk like that to play me out.”

  “You’d better stop in at Colonel Price’s and rest a while before you start back,” he suggested.

  “Maybe I will,” said she.

  She plunged her hand into the black draw-string bag which she carried on her arm, rummaging among its contents.

  “That little rambo tree you planted a couple of years ago had two apples on it,” she told him, “but I never noticed ’em all summer, the leaves was so thick and it was such a little feller, anyhow.”

  “It is a little one to begin bearing,” said Joe, with a boy’s interest in a thing that he has done with his own hand turning out to be something.

  “Yes; and I aimed to leave them on the tree till you could see them, but the hard wind yesterday shook ’em off. Here they are, I’ve fetched ’em to you, son.”

  Joe took the apples, the recollection of the high hopes which he had centered around that little apple-tree when he planted it coming back to him like a scented wind at dawn. He had planned to make that tree the nucleus of an orchard, which was to grow and spread until it covered the old home place, the fields adjoining, and lifted the curse of poverty from the Newbolt name. It had been a boyish plan which his bondage to Isom Chase had set back.

  He had not given it up for a day while he labored in Chase’s fields. When he became his own man he always intended to take it up and put it through. Now, there in his hand, was the first fruit of his big intention, and in that moment Joe reviewed his old pleasant dream.

  He saw again as he had pictured it before, to the relief of many a long, hot day in Isom’s fields, his thousand trees upon the hills, the laden wagons rolling to the station with his barrels of fruit, some of it to go to far lands across the sea. He saw again the stately house with its white columns and deep porticoes, in the halls of which his fancy had reveled many a happy hour, and he saw–the bars of his stone cell and his mother’s work-hardened hands clasping them, while she looked at him with the pain of her sad heart speaking from her eyes. A heavy tear rolled down his hollow cheek and fell upon the apples in his hand.

  For the pain of prison he had not wept, nor for its shame. The vexing circumstance of being misunderstood, the dread threat of the future had not claimed a tear. But for a dream which had sprung like a sweet flower in his young heart and had passed away like a mist, he wept.

  His mother knew nothing about that blasted dream; the gloom of his cell concealed his tears. He rubbed the fruit along his coat sleeve, as if to make it shine, as a fruiterer polishes the apples in his stall.

  “All right, Mother, I’m glad you brought them,” he said, although there was no gladness in his voice.

  “I planned to fetch you in some fried chicken today, too,” said she, “but the pesky rooster I had under the tub got away when I went to take him out. If you’d like some, Joe, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “No, no; don’t you tramp over here tomorrow, Mother,” he admonished, “and don’t bother about the chicken. I don’t seem to have any appetite any more. But you wait till I’m out of here a day or two; then you’ll see me eat.”

  “Well, then I guess I’ll be goin’ on back, Joe; and bright and early Monday morning I’ll be on hand at the court. Maybe we’ll be able to go home together that evenin’, son.”

  “Hammer says it will take two or three days,” Joe told her, “but I don’t see what they can do to make it string out that long. I could tell them all about it in ten minutes. So we mustn’t put our hopes too high on Monday, Mother.”

  “I’ll beseech the Lord all day tomorrow, son, to open their ears that they may hear,” said she solemnly. “And when the time comes to speak tell it all, Joe, tell it all!”

  “Yes, Mother, when the time comes,” said he gently.

  “Tell ’em all Isom said to you, son,” she charged.

  “Don’t you worry over that now, Mother.”

  She felt that her son drew away from her, in his haughty manner of self-sufficiency, as he spoke. She sighed, shaking her head sadly. “Well, I’ll be rackin’ off home,” she said.

  “If you stop at the colonel’s to rest a while, Mother–and I wish you would, for you’re all tired out–you might hand this book back to Miss Price. She loaned it to me. Tell her I read it long ago, and I’d have sent it back before now, only I thought she might come after it herself some time.”

  His mother turned to him, a curious expression in her face.

  “Don’t she come any more, Joe?”

  “She’s been busy with other things, I guess,” said he.

  “Maybe,” she allowed, with a feeling of resentment against the book on account of its cold, unfriendly owner.

  She had almost reached the corridor gate when Joe called after her.

  “No, don’t tell her that,” he requested. “Don’t tell her anything. Just hand it back, please, Mother.”

  “Whatever you say, Joe.”

  Joe heard the steel gate close after her and the sheriff’s voice loud above his mother’s as they went toward the door.

  Loyal as he was to his mother, the thought of her went out with her, and in her place stood the slender figure of youth, her lips “like a thread of scarlet.” One day more to wait for the event of his justification and vindication, or at least the beginning of it, thought Joe.

  Ah, if Alice only would come to lighten the interval!

  * * *

  CHAPTER XV

  THE STATE VS.NEWBOLT

  The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and close around the building.

  In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of these spreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a giant tree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place. It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fine old days before the war.

  There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one of the logs of the original court-house, built in that square more than sixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for the murder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summer days, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirring incidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut in the tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recall memories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.

  Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now, scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn half-way to the top.

  The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels of reluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be pronounced upon them, had kicked it in protest as they passed. It was as solemn and gloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had gone up it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treads were worn to splinters; its balustrade was hacked by the knives of generations of loiterers. There was no window in the wall giving upon it; darkness hung over its first landing on the brightest day. The just and the unjust alike were shrouded in its gloomy penumbra as they passed. It was the solemn warder at the gate, which seemed to cast a taint over all who came, and fasten a cloud upon them which they must stand in the white light of justice to purge away.

  When the civil war began, the flag of the Union was taken down from the cupola of the court-house. In all the years that had passed since its close, the flag never had been hoisted to its place of honor again. That event was not to take plac
e, indeed, until twenty years or more after the death of Isom Chase, when the third court-house was built, and the old generation had passed away mainly, and those who remained of it had forgotten. But that incident is an incursion into matters which do not concern this tale.

  Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcely astir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons of farmers and the straggling troops of horsemen from far-lying districts began to come in and seek hitching-room around the court-house square. It looked very early in the day as if there was going to be an unusual crowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.

  Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spread wider than the sound of the best deeds of the worthiest man in the county. It was not so much on account of the notoriety of the old man, which had not died with him, as the mystery in the manner of his death, that people were anxious to attend the trial.

  It was not known whether Joe Newbolt was to take the witness-stand in his own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; under the law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of his testimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor’s hand. Joe would be confronted with that, and, if there was a spark of spunk in him, people said, he would rise up and stand by it. And then, once Sam Lucas got him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions and concealments.

  Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state had summoned forty witnesses; Hammer’s list was half as long. It was a question in the public speculation what either side expected to prove or disprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to prove very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw of his client’s well-known honesty and clean past.