The Bondboy

by Ogden, George W

  But Sol was a suspicious customer. He hesitated and he hummed, backed and sidled, and didn’t know anything more than he had related. The bag of money which had been found with Isom’s body had been introduced by the state for identification by Sol. Hammer took up the matter with a sudden turn toward sharpness and belligerency.

  “You say that this is the same sack of money that was there on the floor with Isom Chase’s body when you entered the room?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” nodded Sol.

  “Tell this jury how you know it’s the same one!” ordered Hammer, in stern voice.

  “Well, I seen it,” said Sol.

  “Oh, yes, you saw it. Well, did you go over to it and make a mark on it so you’d know it again?”

  “No, I never done that,” admitted Sol.

  “Don’t you know the banks are full of little sacks of money like that?” Hammer wanted to know.

  “I reckon maybe they air,” Sol replied.

  “And this one might be any one of a thousand like it, mightn’t it, Sol?”

  “Well, I don’t reckon it could. That’s the one Isom had.”

  “Did you step over where the dead body was at and heft it?”

  “’Course I never,” said Sol.

  “Did you open it and count the money in it, or tie a string or something onto it so you’d know it when you saw it again?”

  “No, I never,” said Sol sulkily.

  “Then how do you know this is it?”

  “I tell you I seen it,” persisted Sol.

  “Oh, you seen it!” repeated Hammer, sweeping the jury a cunning look as if to apprise them that he had found out just what he wanted to know, and that upon that simple admission he was about to turn the villainy of Sol Greening inside out for them to see with their own intelligent eyes.

  “Yes, I said I seen it,” maintained Sol, bristling up a little.

  “Yes, I heard you say it, and now I want you to tell this jury how you know!”

  Hammer threw the last word into Sol’s face with a slam that made him jump. Sol turned red under the whiskers, around the whiskers, and all over the uncovered part of him. He shifted in his chair; he swallowed.

  “Well, I don’t just know,” said he.

  “No, you don’t–just–know!” sneered Hammer, glowing in oily triumph. He looked at the jury confidentially, as on the footing of a shrewd man with his equally shrewd audience.

  Then he took up the old rifle, and Isom’s bloody coat and shirt, which were also there as exhibits, and dressed Sol down on all of them, working hard to create the impression in the minds of the jurors that Sol Greening was a born liar, and not to be depended on in the most trivial particular.

  Hammer worked himself up into a sweat and emitted a great deal of perfume of barberish–and barbarous–character, and glanced around the court-room with triumph in his eyes and satisfaction at the corners of his mouth.

  He came now to the uncertainty of Sol’s memory on the matter of being bidden to enter the kitchen when he knocked. Sol had now passed from doubt to certainty. Come to think it over, said he, nobody had said a word when he knocked at that door. He remembered now that it was as still inside the house as if everybody was away.

  Mrs. Greening was standing against the wall, having that moment returned to the room from ministering to her daughter’s baby. She held the infant in her arms, waiting Sol’s descent from the witness-chair so she might settle down in her place without disturbing the proceedings. When she heard her husband make this positive declaration, her mouth fell open and her eyes widened in surprise.

  “Why Sol,” she spoke up reprovingly, “you told me Joe––”

  It had taken the prosecuting attorney that long to glance around and spring to his feet. There his voice, in a loud appeal to the court for the protection of his sacred rights, drowned that of mild Mrs. Greening. The judge rapped, the sheriff rapped; Captain Taylor, from his post at the door, echoed the authoritative sound.

  Hammer abruptly ceased his questioning of Sol, after the judge had spoken a few crisp words of admonishment, not directed in particular at Mrs. Greening, but more to the public at large, regarding the decorum of the court. Sam Lucas thereupon took Sol in hand again, and drew him on to replace his former doubtful statement by his later conclusion. As Sol left the witness-chair Hammer smiled. He handed Mrs. Greening’s name to the clerk, and requested a subpoena for her as a witness for the defense.

  Sol’s son Dan was the next witness, and Hammer put him through a similar course of sprouts. Judge Maxwell allowed Hammer to disport uncurbed until it became evident that, if given his way, the barber-lawyer would drag the trial out until Joe was well along in middle life. He then admonished Hammer that there were bounds fixed for human existence, and that the case must get on.

  Hammer was a bit uppish and resentful. He stood on his rights; he invoked the sacred constitution; he referred to the revised statutes; he put his hand into his coat and spread his legs to make a memorable protest.

  Judge Maxwell took him in hand very kindly and led safely past the point of explosion with a smile of indulgence. With that done, the state came to Constable Bill Frost and his branching mustaches, which he had trimmed up and soaped back quite handsomely.

  To his own credit and the surprise of the lawyers who were watching the case, Hammer made a great deal of the point of Joe having gone to Frost, voluntarily and alone, to summon him to the scene of the tragedy. Frost admitted that he had believed Joe’s story until Sol Greening had pointed out to him the suspicious circumstances.

  “So you have to have somebody else to do your thinkin’ for you, do you?” said Hammer. “Well, you’re a fine officer of the law and a credit to this state!”

  “I object!” said the prosecuting attorney, standing up in his place, very red around the eyes.

  The judge smiled, and the court-room tittered. The sheriff looked back over his shoulder and rapped the table for order.

  “Comment is unnecessary, Mr. Hammer,” said the judge. “Proceed with the case.”

  And so that weary day passed in trivial questioning on both sides, trivial bickerings, and waste of time, to the great edifications of everybody but Joe and his mother, and probably the judge. Ten of the state’s forty witnesses were disposed of, and Hammer was as moist as a jug of cold water in a shock of wheat.

  When the sheriff started to take Joe back to jail, the lad stood for a moment searching the breaking-up and moving assembly with longing eyes. All day he had sat with his back to the people, not having the heart to look around with that shameful handcuff and chain binding his arm to the chair. If Alice had been there, or Colonel Price, neither had come forward to wish him well.

  There were Ollie and her mother, standing as they had risen from their bench, waiting for the crowd ahead of them to set in motion toward the door, and here and there a face from his own neighborhood. But Alice was not among them. She had withdrawn her friendship from him in his darkest hour.

  Neither had Morgan appeared to put his shoulder under the hard-pressing load and relieve him of its weight. Day by day it was growing heavier; but a little while remained until it must crush out his hope forever. Certainly, there was a way out without Morgan; there was a way open to him leading back into the freedom of the world, where he might walk again with the sunlight on his face. A word would make it clear.

  But the sun would never strike again into his heart if he should go back to it under that coward’s reprieve, and Alice–Alice would scorn his memory.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE BLOW OF A FRIEND

  Progress was swifter the next day. The prosecuting attorney, apparently believing that he had made his case, dismissed many of his remaining witnesses who had nothing to testify to in fact. When he announced that the state rested, there was a murmur and rustling in the room, and audibly expressed wonderment over what the public thought to be a grave blunder on Sam Lucas’s part.

  The state had not
called the widow of Isom Chase to the stand to give testimony against the man accused of her husband’s murder. The public could not make it out. What did it mean? Did the prosecutor hold her more of an enemy than a friend to his efforts to convict the man whose hand had made her a widow? Whispers went around, grave faces were drawn, wise heads wagged. Public charity for Ollie began to falter.

  “Him and that woman,” men said, nodding toward Joe, sitting pale and inscrutable beside his blustering lawyer.

  The feeling of impending sensation became more acute when it circulated through the room, starting from Captain Taylor at the inner door, that Ollie had been summoned as a witness for the defense; Captain Taylor had served the subpoena himself.

  “Well, in that case, Sam Lucas knew what he was doing,” people allowed. “Just wait!” It was as good as a spirituous stimulant to their lagging interest. “Just you wait till Sam Lucas gets hold of her,” they said.

  Hammer began the defense by calling his character witnesses and establishing Joe’s past reputation for “truth and veracity and general uprightness.”

  There was no question in the character which Joe’s neighbors gave him. They spoke warmly of his past record among them, of his fidelity to his word and obligation, and of the family record, which Hammer went into with free and unhampered hand.

  The prosecutor passed these witnesses with serene confidence. He probably believed that his case was already made, people said, or else he was reserving his fire for Isom’s widow, who, it seemed to everybody, had turned against nature and her own interests in allying herself with the accused.

  The morning was consumed in the examination of these character witnesses, Hammer finishing with the last of them just before the midday adjournment. The sheriff was preparing to remove the prisoner. Joe’s hand had been released from the arm of the chair, and the officer had fastened the iron around his wrist. The proceeding always struck Joe with an overwhelming wave of degradation and now he stood with bowed head and averted face.

  “Come on,” said the sheriff, goggling down at him with froggish eyes from his vantage on the dais where the witness-chair stood, his long neck on a slant like a giraffe’s. The sheriff took great pleasure in the proceeding of attaching the irons. It was his one central moment in the eyes of the throng.

  Joe looked up to march ahead of the sheriff out of the room, and his eyes met the eyes of Alice. She was not far away, and the cheer of their quick message was like a spoken word. She was wearing the same gray dress that she had worn on that day of days, with the one bright feather in her bonnet, and she smiled, nodding to him. And then the swirl of bobbing heads and moving bodies came between them and she was lost.

  He looked for her again as the sheriff pushed him along toward the door, but the room was in such confusion that he could not single her out. The judge had gone out through his tall, dark door, and the court-room was no longer an awesome place to those who had gathered for the trial. Men put their hats on their heads and lit their pipes, and bit into their twists and plugs of tobacco and emptied their mouths of the juices as they went slowly toward the door.

  Mrs. Greening was the first witness called by Hammer after the noon recess. Hammer quickly discovered his purpose in calling her as being nothing less than that of proving by her own mouth that her husband, Sol, was a gross and irresponsible liar.

  Hammer went over the whole story of the tragedy–Mrs. Greening having previously testified to all these facts as a witness for the state–from the moment that Sol had called her out of bed and taken her to the Chase home to support the young widow in her hour of distraction and fear. By slow and lumbering ways he led her, like a blind horse floundering along a heavy road, through the front door, up the stairs into Ollie’s room, and then, in his own time and fashion, he arrived at what he wanted to ask.

  “Now I want you to tell this jury, Mrs. Greening, if at any time, during that night or thereafter, you discussed or talked of or chatted about the killing of Isom Chase with your husband?” asked Hammer.

  “Oh laws, yes,” said Mrs. Greening.

  The prosecuting attorney was rising slowly to his feet. He seemed concentrated on something; a frown knotted his brow, and he stood with his open hand poised as if to reach out quickly and check the flight of something which he expected to wing in and assail the jury.

  Said Hammer, after wiping his glistening forehead with a yellow silk handkerchief:

  “Yes. And now, Mrs. Greening, I will ask you if at any time your husband ever told you what was said, if anything, by any party inside of that house when he run up to the kitchen door that night and knocked?”

  “I object!” said the prosecutor sharply, flinging out his ready hand.

  “Don’t answer that question!” warned the judge.

  Mrs. Greening had it on her lips; anybody who could read print on a signboard could have told what they were shaped to say. She held them there in their preliminary position of enunciation, pursed and wrinkled, like the tied end of a sausage-link.

  “I will frame the question in another manner,” said Hammer, again feeling the need of his large handkerchief.

  “There is no form that would be admissible, your honor,” protested the prosecutor. “It is merely hearsay that the counsel for the defense is attempting to bring out and get before the jury. I object!”

  “Your course of questioning, Mr. Hammer, is highly improper, and in flagrant violation to the established rules of evidence,” said the judge. “You must confine yourself to proof by this witness of what she, of her own knowledge and experience, is cognizant of. Nothing else is permissible.”

  “But, your honor, I intend to show by this witness that when Sol Greening knocked on that door––”

  “I object! She wasn’t present; she has testified that she was at home at that time, and in bed.”

  This from the prosecutor, in great heat.

  “Your honor, I intend to prove–” began Hammer.

  “This line of questioning is not permissible, as I told you before,” said the judge in stern reproof.

  But Hammer was obdurate. He was for arguing it, and the judge ordered the sheriff to conduct the jury from the room. Mrs. Greening, red and uncomfortable, and all at sea over it, continued sitting in the witness-chair while Hammer laid it off according to his view of it, and the prosecutor came back and tore his contentions to pieces.

  The judge, for no other purpose, evidently, than to prove to the defendant and public alike that he was unbiased and fair–knowing beforehand what his ruling must be–indulged Hammer until he expended his argument. Then he laid the matter down in few words.

  Mrs. Greening had not been present when her husband knocked on the door of Isom Chase’s kitchen that night; she did not know, therefore, of her own experience what was spoken. No matter what her husband told her he said, or anybody else said, she could not repeat the words there under oath. It would be hearsay evidence, and such evidence was not admissible in any court of law. No matter how important such testimony might appear to one seeking the truth, the rules of evidence in civilized courts barred it. Mrs. Greening’s lips must remain sealed on what Sol said Joe said, or anybody said to someone else.

  So the jury was called back, and Mrs. Greening was excused, and Hammer wiped off the sweat and pushed back his cuffs. And the people who had come in from their farmsteads to hear this trial by jury–all innocent of the traditions and precedents of practice of the law–marveled how it could be. Why, nine people out of nine, all over the township where Sol Greening lived, would take his wife’s word for anything where she and Sol had different versions of a story.

  It looked to them like Sol had told the truth in the first place to his wife, and lied on the witness-stand. And here she was, all ready to show the windy old rascal up, and they wouldn’t let her. Well, it beat all two o’clock!

  Of course, being simple people who had never been at a university in their lives, they did not know that Form and Precedent are the two pillars of Stre
ngth and Beauty, the Jachin and Boaz at the entrance of the temple of the law. Or that the proper genuflections before them are of more importance than the mere bringing out of a bit of truth which might save an accused man’s life.

  And so it stood before the jury that Sol Greening had knocked on the door of Isom Chase’s kitchen that night and had not been bidden to enter, when everybody in the room, save the jury of twelve intelligent men–who had been taken out to keep their innocence untainted and their judgment unbiased by a gleam of the truth–knew that he had sat up there and lied.

  Hammer cooled himself off after a few minutes of mopping, and called Ollie Chase to the witness-chair. Ollie seemed nervous and full of dread as she stood for a moment stowing her cloak and handbag in her mother’s lap. She turned back for her handkerchief when she had almost reached the little gate in the railing through which she must pass to the witness-chair. Hammer held it open for her and gave her the comfort of his hand under her elbow as she went forward to take her place.

  A stir and a whispering, like a quick wind in a cornfield, moved over the room when Ollie’s name was called. Then silence ensued. It was more than a mere listening silence; it was impertinent. Everybody looked for a scandal, and most of them hoped that they should not depart that day with their long-growing hunger unsatisfied.

  Ollie took the witness-chair with an air of extreme nervousness. As she settled down in her cloud of black skirt, black veil, and shadow of black sailor hat, she cast about the room a look of timid appeal. She seemed to be sounding the depths of the listening crowd’s sympathy, and to find it shallow and in shoals.

  Hammer was kind, with an unctuous, patronizing gentleness. He seemed to approach her with the feeling that she might say a great deal that would be damaging to the defendant if she had a mind to do it, but with gentle adroitness she could be managed to his advantage. Led by a question here, a helping reminder there, Ollie went over her story, in all particulars the same as she had related at the inquest.