The Bondboy Read online

  The prosecuting attorney turned from the window with alacrity, and Hammer, sweating and shaking his head in one last gesture of protest to his client–who leaned back and folded his arms, with set and stubborn face–rose ponderously. He wiped his forehead with his great, broad handkerchief, and squared himself as if about to try a high hurdle or plunge away in a race.

  “Joseph Newbolt, take the witness-chair,” said he.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVIII

  A NAME AND A MESSAGE

  When Hammer called his name, Joe felt a revival of his old desire to go to the witness-chair and tell Judge Maxwell all about it in his own way, untenable and dangerous as his position had appeared to him in his hours of depression. Now the sheriff released his arm, and he went forward eagerly. He held up his hand solemnly while the clerk administered the oath, then took his place in the witness-chair. Ollie’s face was the first one that his eyes found in the crowd.

  It seemed as if a strong light had been focused upon it, leaving the rest of the house in gloom. The shrinking appeal which lay in her eyes moved him to pity. He strove to make her understand that the cunning of the sharpest lawyer could set no trap which would surprise her secret from him, nor death itself display terrors to frighten it out of his heart.

  It seemed that a sunbeam broke in the room then, but perhaps it was only the clearing away of doubt and vacillation from his mind, with the respectable feeling that he had regained all the nobility which was slipping from him, and had come back to a firm understanding with himself.

  And there was Alice, a little nearer to the bar than he had expected to see her. Her face seemed strained and anxious, but he could not tell whether her sympathy was dearer, her feeling softer for him in that hour than it would have been for any other man. Colonel Price had yielded his seat to a woman, and now he stood at the back of the room in front of the inner door as a privileged person, beside Captain Taylor.

  Mrs. Newbolt sat straight-backed and expectant, her hand on the back of Joe’s empty chair, while the eager people strained forward to possess themselves of the sensation which they felt must soon be loosed among them.

  Joe’s hair had grown long during his confinement. He had smoothed it back from his forehead and tucked it behind his ears. The length of it, the profusion, sharpened the thinness of his face; the depth of its blackness drew out his pallor until he seemed all bloodless and cold.

  Three inches of great, bony arm showed below his coat sleeves; that spare garment buttoned across his chest, strained at its seams. Joe wore the boots which he had on when they arrested him, scarred and work-worn by the stubble and thorns of Isom Chase’s fields and pastures. His trousers were tucked into their wrinkled tops, which sagged half-way down his long calves.

  Taken in the figure alone, he was uncouth and oversized in his common and scant gear. But the lofty nobility of his severe young face and the high-lifting forehead, proclaimed to all who were competent in such matters that it was only his body that was meanly clad.

  Hammer began by asking the usual questions regarding nativity and age, and led on with the history of Joe’s apprenticeship to Chase, the terms of it, its duration, compensation; of his treatment at his master’s hands, their relations of friendliness, and all that. There was a little tremor and unsteadiness in Joe’s voice at first, as of fright, but this soon cleared away, and he answered in steady tones.

  The jurors had straightened up out of their wearied apathy, and were listening now with all ears. Joe did not appear to comprehend their importance in deciding his fate, people thought, seeing that he turned from them persistently and addressed the judge.

  Joe had taken the stand against Hammer’s advice and expectation, for he had hoped in the end to be able to make his client see the danger of such a step unless he should go forward in the intention of revealing everything. Now the voluble lawyer was winded. He proceeded with extreme caution in his questioning, like one walking over mined ground, fearing that he might himself lead his client into some fateful admission.

  They at length came down to the morning that Isom went away to the county-seat to serve on the jury, and all had progressed handsomely. Now Joe told how Isom had patted him on the shoulder that morning, for it had been the aim of Hammer all along to show that master and man were on the most friendly terms, and how Isom had expressed confidence in him. He recounted how, in discharge of the trust that Isom had put in him, he had come downstairs on the night of the tragedy to look around the premises, following in all particulars his testimony on this point before the coroner’s jury.

  Since beginning his story, Joe had not looked at Ollie. His attention had been divided between Hammer and the judge, turning from one to the other. He addressed the jury only when admonished by Hammer to do so, and then he frequently prefaced his reply to Hammer’s question with:

  “I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” as if he feared he might have hurt their feelings by his oversight.

  Ollie was cold with apprehension as Joe approached the point in his recital where the danger lay for her. He seemed now to be unaware of her presence, and the fact that he did not seek to assure her with his eyes gave a somber color to her doubts. She knew Hammer’s crafty reputation, and understood his eagerness to bring his client off clear. Perhaps he had worked on Joe to make a clean breast of it. Maybe he was going to tell.

  All her confidence of a little while ago dissolved, the ease which followed her descent from the witness-chair vanished. She plucked at her dark vestments with trembling hands, her lips half open, her burning eyes on Joe’s unmoved face. If he should tell before all these people, before that stern, solemn judge–if he should tell!

  Joe went on with his story, Hammer endeavoring to lead him, to the best of his altogether inadequate ability, around the dangerous shoals. But there was no avoiding them. When it came to relating the particulars of the tragedy, Hammer left it all to Joe, and Joe told the story, in all essentials, just as he had told it under the questioning of the coroner.

  “We had some words, and Isom started for the gun,” said he.

  He went over how he had grappled with Isom in an endeavor to prevent him turning the gun against him; told of the accidental discharge of the weapon; the arrival of Sol Greening.

  Judge Maxwell leaned back in his chair and listened, his face a study of perplexity and interest. Now and then he lifted his drooping lids and shot a quick, searching glance at the witness, as if seeking to fathom the thing that he had covered–the motive for Isom Chase’s act. It was such an inadequate story, yet what there was of it was undoubtedly true.

  After Hammer had asked further questions tending to establish the fact of good feeling and friendship between Joe and Isom, he gave it over, knowing full well that Joe had set back his chances of acquittal further than he had advanced them by his persistency in testifying as he had done.

  The jury was now in a fog of doubt, as anybody with half an eye could see, and there was Sam Lucas waiting, his eyes glistening, his hard lips set in anticipation of the coming fight.

  “Take the witness,” said Hammer, with something in his manner like a sigh.

  The prosecuting attorney came up to it like a hound on the scent. He had been waiting for that day. He proceeded with Joe in a friendly manner, and went over the whole thing with him again, from the day that he entered Isom’s house under bond service to the night of the tragedy. Sam Lucas went with Joe to the gate; he stood with him in the moonlight there; then he accompanied him back to the house, clinging to him like his own garments.

  “And when you opened the kitchen door and stepped inside of that room, what did you do?” asked the prosecutor, arranging the transcript of Joe’s testimony before the coroner’s jury in his hands.

  “I lit the lamp,” said Joe.

  “Yes; you lit the lamp. Now, why did you light the lamp?”

  “Because I wanted to see,” replied Joe.

  “Exactly. You wanted to see.”

  Here the prosecutor
moved his eyes slowly along the two rows of jurors as if he wanted to make certain that none of them had escaped, and as if he desired to see that every one of them was alert and wakeful for what he was about to develop.

  “Now, tell the jury what you wanted to see.”

  “Object!” from Hammer, who rose with his right hand held high, his small finger and thumb doubled in his palm, like a bidder at an auction.

  “Now, your honor, am I to be–” began the prosecutor with wearied patience.

  “Object!” interrupted Hammer, sweating like a haymaker.

  “To what do you object, Mr. Hammer?” asked the court mildly.

  “To anything and everything he’s about to ask!” said Hammer hotly.

  The court-room received this with a laugh, for there were scores of cornfield lawyers present. The judge smiled, balancing a pen between finger and thumb.

  “The objection is overruled,” said he.

  “When you lit that lamp, what did you want to see?” the prosecutor asked again.

  “I wanted to see my way upstairs,” Joe answered.

  The prosecutor threw off his friendly manner like a rustic flinging his coat for a fight. He stepped to the foot of the dais on which the witness chair stood, and aimed his finger at Joe’s face.

  “What were you carrying in your hand?” he demanded, advancing his finger a little with every word, as if it held the key to the mystery, and it was about to be inserted in the lock.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “What had you hidden in that room that you wanted a light to find?”

  Ha, he’s coming down to it now! whispered the people, turning wise looks from man to man. Uncle Posen Spratt set his horn trumpet to his ear, gave it a twist and settled the socket of it so firmly that not a word could leak out on the way.

  “I hadn’t hidden anything, sir,” said Joe.

  “Where did Isom Chase keep his money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Had you ever seen him putting any of it away around the barn, or in the haystack, maybe?”

  “No, I never did, sir,” Joe answered, respectfully.

  The prosecutor took up the now historic bag of gold-pieces and held it up before the witness.

  “When did you first see this bag of money?” he asked, solemn and severe of voice and bearing.

  “When Isom was lying on the floor, after he was shot.”

  “You didn’t see it when he was trying to get the gun, and when you say you were struggling with him, doing the best you could to hold him back?”

  Joe turned to the judge when he answered.

  “It might have been that Isom had it in his arm, sir, when he made for the place where the gun was hanging. I don’t know. But he tried to keep me off, and he hugged one arm to his side like he was trying to hide something he didn’t want me to see.”

  “You never saw that bag of money until the moment that Isom Chase fell, you say,” said the prosecutor, “but you have testified that the first words of Isom Chase when he stepped into the kitchen and saw you, were ‘I’ll kill you!’ Why did he make that threat?”

  “Well, Isom was a man of unreasonable temper,” said Joe.

  “Isn’t it a fact that Isom Chase saw you with that bag of money in your hand when he came in, and sprang for the gun to protect his property?”

  Joe turned to the judge again, with an air of respectful patience.

  “I never saw that little pouch of money, Judge Maxwell, sir, until Isom fell, and lay stretched out there on the floor. I never saw that much money before in my life, and I expect that I thought more about it for a minute than I did about Isom. It all happened so quick, you know, sir.”

  Joe spoke the last words with a covert appeal in them, as if placing the matter before the judge alone, in the confidence of his superior understanding, and the belief that he would feel their truth.

  The judge seemed to understand. He nodded encouragingly and smiled.

  “Do you recall the morning after your arrival at the home of Isom Chase to begin your service there, when you threatened to kill him?” asked the prosecutor.

  “I do recall that morning,” admitted Joe; “but I don’t feel that it’s fair to hold me to account for words spoken in sudden anger and under trying circumstances. A young person, you know, sir”–addressing the judge–“oftentimes says things he don’t mean, and is sorry for the next minute. You know how hot the blood of youth is, sir, and how it drives a person to say more than he means sometimes.”

  “Now, your honor, this defendant has counsel to plead for him at the proper time,” complained the prosecutor, “and I demand that he confine himself to answering my questions without comment.”

  “Let the witness explain in his own way,” said the judge, who probably felt that this concession, at least, was due a man on trial for his life. There was a finality in his words which did not admit of dispute, and the prosecuting attorney was wise enough not to attempt it.

  “You threatened to kill Isom Chase that morning when he laid hands on you and pulled you out of bed. Your words were, as you have heard Mrs. Chase testify under oath in that very chair where you now sit, ‘If you hit me, I’ll kill you in your tracks!’ Those were your words, were they not?”

  “I expect I said something like that–I don’t just remember the exact words now–but that was what I wanted him to understand. I don’t think I’d have hurt him very much, though, and I couldn’t have killed him, because I wasn’t armed. It was a hot-blooded threat, that’s all it was.”

  “You didn’t ordinarily pack a gun around with you, then?”

  “No, sir, I never did pack a gun.”

  “But you said you’d kill old Isom up there in the loft that morning, and you said it in a way that made him think you meant it. That’s what you wanted him to understand, wasn’t it?”

  “I talked rough, but I didn’t mean it–not as bad as that anyhow.”

  “No, that was just a little neighborly joke, I suppose,” said the prosecutor sneeringly. He was playing for a laugh and he got it.

  Captain Taylor almost skinned his knuckles rapping them down that time, although the mirth was neither general nor boisterous. Joe did not add to Lucas’s comment, and he went on:

  “Well, what were you doing when Isom Chase opened the door and came into the kitchen that night when he came home from serving on the jury?”

  “I was standing by the table,” said Joe.

  “With your hat in your hand, or on your head, or where?”

  “My hat was on the table. I usually left it there at night, so it would be handy when I came down in the morning. I threw it there when I went in, before I lit the lamp.”

  “And you say that Isom opened the door, came in and said, ‘I’ll kill you!’ Now, what did he say before that?”

  “Not a word, sir,” insisted Joe.

  “Who else was in that room?”

  “Nobody, sir.”

  The prosecutor leaned forward, his face as red as if he struggled to lift a heavy weight.

  “Do you mean to sit there and tell this jury that Isom Chase stepped right into that room and threatened to kill you without any reason, without any previous quarrel, without seeing you doing something that gave him ground for his threat?”

  Joe moved his feet uneasily, clasped and unclasped his long fingers where they rested on the arm of his chair, and moistened his lips with his tongue. The struggle was coming now. They would rack him, and tear him, and break his heart.

  “I don’t know whether they’ll believe it or not,” said he at last.

  “Where was Ollie Chase when Isom came into that room?” asked the prosecutor, lowering his voice as the men who tiptoed around old Isom when he lay dead on the kitchen floor had lowered theirs.

  “You have heard her say that she was in her room upstairs,” said Joe.

  “But I am asking you this question,” the prosecutor reminded him sharply. “Where was Ollie Chase?”

  Joe did not meet
his questioner’s eyes when he answered. His head was bowed slightly, as if in thought.

  “She was in her room, I suppose. She’d been in bed a long time, for it was nearly midnight then.”

  The prosecuting attorney pursued this line of questioning to a persistent and trying length. He wanted to know all about the relations of Joe and Ollie; where their respective rooms were, how they passed to and from them, and the entire scheme of the household economy.

  He asked Joe pointedly, and swung back to that question abruptly and with sharp challenge many times, whether he ever made love to Ollie; whether he ever held her hands, kissed her, talked with her when Isom was not by to hear what was said.

  The people snuggled down and forgot the oncoming darkness, the gray forerunner of which already had invaded the room as they listened. This was what they wanted to hear; this was, in their opinion, getting down to the thing that the prosecutor should have taken up at the beginning and pushed to the guilty end. They had come there, day after day, and sat patiently waiting for that very thing. But the great sensation which they expected seemed a tedious thing in its development.

  Joe calmly denied the prosecutor’s imputations, and put them aside with an evenness of temper and dignity which lifted him to a place of high regard in the heart of every woman present, from grandmother to high-school miss. For even though a woman believes her sister guilty, she admires the man who knows when to hold his tongue.

  For two hours and more Sam Lucas kept hammering away at the stern front of the defendant witness. He had expected to break him down, simple-minded country lad that he supposed him to be, in a quarter of that time, and draw from him the truth of the matter in every detail. It was becoming evident that Joe was feeling the strain. The tiresome repetition of the questions, the unvarying denial, the sudden sorties of the prosecutor in attempt to surprise him, and the constant labor of guarding against it–all this was heaping up into a terrific load.

  Time and again Joe’s eyes had gone to the magnet of Alice Price’s face, and always he had seen her looking straight at him–steadily, understandingly, as if she read his purpose. He was satisfied that she knew him to be innocent of that crime, as well as any of the indiscretions with Ollie which the prosecutor had attempted to force him to admit. If he could have been satisfied with that assurance alone, his hour would have been blessed. But he looked for more in every fleeting glance that his eyes could wing to her, and in the turmoil of his mind he was unable to find that which he sought.