The Bondboy

by Ogden, George W

  Hammer brought out, with many confidential glances at the jury, the distance between Ollie’s room and the kitchen; the fact that she had her door closed, that she had gone to bed heavy with weariness, and was asleep long before midnight; that she had been startled by a sound, a strange and mysterious sound for that quiet house, and had sat up in her bed listening. Sol Greening had called her next, in a little while, even before she could master her fright and confusion and muster courage to run down the hall and call Joe.

  Hammer did well with the witness; that was the general opinion, drawing from her a great deal about Joe’s habit of life in Isom’s house, a great deal about Isom’s temper, hard ways, and readiness to give a blow.

  She seemed reluctant to discuss Isom’s faults, anxious, rather, to ease them over after the manner of one whose judgment has grown less severe with the lapse of time.

  Had he ever laid hands on her in temper? Hammer wanted to know.

  “Yes.” Her reply was a little more than a whisper, with head bent, with tears in her sad eyes. Under Hammer’s pressure she told about the purchase of the ribbon, of Isom’s iron hand upon her throat.

  The women all over the room made little sounds of pitying deprecation of old Isom’s penury, and when Hammer drew from her, with evident reluctance on her part to yield it up, the story of her hard-driven, starved, and stingy life under Isom’s roof, they put their handkerchiefs to their eyes.

  All the time Ollie was following Hammer’s kind leading, the prosecuting attorney was sitting with his hands clasped behind his head, balancing his weight on the hinder legs of his chair, his foot thrown over his knee. Apparently he was bored, even worried, by Hammer’s pounding attempts to make Isom out a man who deserved something slower and less merciful than a bullet, years before he came to his violent end.

  Through it all Joe sat looking at Ollie, great pity for her forlorn condition and broken spirit in his honest eyes. She did not meet his glance, not for one wavering second. When she went to the stand she passed him with bent head; in the chair she looked in every direction but his, mainly at her hands, clasped in her lap.

  At last Hammer seemed skirmishing in his mind in search of some stray question which might have escaped him, which he appeared unable to find. He turned his papers, he made a show of considering something, while the witness sat with her head bowed, her half-closed eyelids purple from much weeping, worrying, and watching for the coming of one who had taken the key to her poor, simple heart and gone his careless way.

  “That’s all, Missis Chase,” said Hammer.

  Ollie leaned over, picked up one of her gloves that had fallen to the floor, and started to leave the chair. Her relief was evident in her face. The prosecutor, suddenly alive, was on his feet. He stretched out his arm, staying her with a commanding gesture.

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Chase,” said he.

  A stir of expectation rustled through the room again as Ollie resumed her seat. People moistened their lips, suddenly grown hot and dry.

  “Now, just watch Sam Lucas!” they said.

  “Now, Mrs. Chase,” began the prosecutor, assuming the polemical attitude common to small lawyers when cross-examining a witness; “I’ll ask you to tell this jury whether you were alone in your house with Joe Newbolt on the night of October twelfth, when Isom Chase, your husband, was killed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This man Morgan, the book-agent, who had been boarding with you, had paid his bill and gone away?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And there was absolutely nobody in the house that night but yourself and Joe Newbolt?”

  “Nobody else.”

  “And you have testified, here on this witness-stand, before this court and this jury”–that being another small lawyer’s trick to impress the witness with a sense of his own unworthiness–“that you went to bed early that night. Now, where was Joe Newbolt?”

  “I guess he was in bed,” answered Ollie, her lips white; “I didn’t go to see.”

  “No, you didn’t go to see,” repeated the prosecutor with significant stress. “Very well. Where did your husband keep his money in the house?”

  “I don’t know; I never saw any of it,” Ollie answered.

  The reply drew a little jiggling laugh from the crowd. It rose and died even while Captain Taylor’s knuckles were poised over the panel of the door, and his loud rap fell too late for all, save one deep-chested farmer in a far corner, who must have been a neighbor of old Isom. This man’s raucous mirth seemed a roar above the quiet of the packed room. The prosecutor looked in his direction with a frown. The sheriff stood up and peered over that way threateningly.

  “Preserve order, Mr. Sheriff,” said the judge severely.

  The sheriff pounded the table with his hairy fist. “Now, I tell you I don’t want to hear no more of this!” said he.

  The prosecutor was shaken out of his pose a bit by the court-room laugh. There is nothing equal to a laugh for that, to one who is laboring to impress his importance upon the world. It took him some time to get back to his former degree of heat, skirmishing around with incidental questioning. He looked over his notes, pausing. Then he faced Ollie again quickly, leveling his finger like a pointer of direct accusation.

  “Did Joe Newbolt ever make love to you?” he asked.

  Joe’s face flushed with resentful fire; but Ollie’s white calm, forced and strained that it was, remained unchanged.

  “No, sir; he never did.”

  “Did he ever kiss you?”

  “No, I tell you, he didn’t!” Ollie answered, with a little show of spirit.

  Hammer rose with loud and voluble objections, which had, for the first time during the proceedings, Joe’s hearty indorsement. But the judge waved him down, and the prosecutor pressed his new line of inquisition.

  “You and Joe Newbolt were thrown together a good deal, weren’t you, Mrs. Chase–you were left there alone in the house while your husband was away in the field, and other places, frequently?”

  “No, not very much,” said Ollie, shaking her head.

  “But you had various opportunities for talking together alone, hadn’t you?”

  “I never had a chance for anything but work,” said Ollie wearily.

  Unawed by the sheriff’s warning, the assembly laughed again. The sound ran over the room like a scudding cloud across a meadow, and when the sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze assails a field of grain.

  The sheriff, not being deeper than another man, saw the fatuity of his labor. He turned to the court with a clownish gesture of the hands, expressive of his utter inability to stop this thing.

  “Proceed with the case,” said the judge, understanding the situation better than the sheriff knew.

  The prosecuting attorney labored away with Ollie, full of the feeling that something masked lay behind her pale reticence, some guilty conspiracy between her and the bound boy, which would show the lacking motive for the crime. He asked her again about Morgan, how long she had known him, where he came from, and where he went–a question to which Ollie would have been glad enough to have had the answer herself.

  He hung on to the subject of Morgan so persistently that Joe began to feel his throat drying out with a closing sensation which he could not swallow. He trembled for Ollie, fearing that she would be forced into telling it all. That was not a woman’s story, thought he, with a heart full of resentment for the prosecutor. Let him wait till Morgan came, and then––

  But what grounds had he now for believing Morgan might come? Unless he came within the next hour, his coming might be too late.

  “You were in bed and asleep when the shot that killed your husband was fired, you have told the jury
, Mrs. Chase?” questioned the prosecutor, dropping Morgan at last.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then how did it come that when Mrs. Greening and her daughter-in-law arrived a few minutes later you were all dressed up in a white dress?”

  “I just slipped it on,” said she.

  “You just slipped it on,” repeated the prosecutor, turning his eyes to the jury, and not even facing Mrs. Chase as he spoke, but reading into her words discredit, suspicion, and a guilty knowledge.

  “It was the only one I had besides two old wrappers. It was the one I was married in, and the only one I could put on to look decent in before people,” said she.

  A crowd is the most volatile thing in the world. It can laugh and sigh and groan and weep, as well as shout and storm, with the ease of an infant, and then immediately regain its immobility and fixed attention. With Ollie’s simple statement a sound rose from it which was a denunciation and a curse upon the ashes of old Isom Chase. It was as if a sympathetic old lady had shaken her head and groaned:

  “Oh, shame on you–shame!”

  Hammer gave the jury a wide-sweeping look of satisfaction, and made a note on the tumbled pile of paper which lay in front of him.

  The prosecutor was a man with congressional aspirations, and he did not care to prejudice his popularity by going too far in baiting a woman, especially one who had public sympathy in the measure that it was plainly extended to Ollie. He eased up, descending from his heights of severity, and began to address her respectfully in a manner that was little short of apology for what his stern duty compelled him to do.

  “Now I will ask you, Mrs. Chase, whether your husband and this defendant, Joe Newbolt, ever had words in your hearing?”

  “Once,” Ollie replied.

  “Do you recall the day?”

  “It was the morning after Joe came to our house to work,” said she.

  “Do you remember what the trouble was about and what said?”

  “Well, they said a good deal,” Ollie answered. “They fussed because Joe didn’t get up when Isom called him.”

  Joe felt his heart contract. It seemed to him that Ollie need not have gone into that; it looked as if she was bent not alone on protecting herself, but on fastening the crime on him. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness. Sweat came out on his forehead; his palms grew moist. He had looked for Ollie to stand by him at least, and now she seemed running away, eager to tell something that would sound to his discredit.

  “You may tell the jury what happened that morning, Mrs. Chase.”

  Hammer’s objection fell on barren ground, and Ollie told the story under the directions of the judge.

  “You say there was a sound of scuffling after Isom called him?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yes, it sounded like Isom shook him and Joe jumped out of bed.”

  “And what did Joe Newbolt say?”

  “He said, ‘Put that down! I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit me, I’ll kill you in your tracks!’”

  “That’s what you heard Joe Newbolt say to your husband up there in the loft over your head?”

  The prosecutor was eager. He leaned forward, both hands on the table, and looked at her almost hungrily. The jurymen shuffled their feet and sat up in their chairs with renewed interest. A hush fell over the room. Here was the motive at the prosecutor’s hand.

  “That’s what he said,” Ollie affirmed, her gaze bent downward.

  She told how Isom had come down after that, followed by Joe. And the prosecutor asked her to repeat what she had heard Joe say once more for the benefit of the jury. He spoke with the air of a man who already has the game in the bag.

  When the prosecutor was through with his profitable cross-examination, Hammer tried to lessen the effect of Ollie’s damaging disclosure, but failed. He was a depressed and crestfallen man when he gave it up.

  Ollie stepped down from the place of inquisition with the color of life coming again into her drained lips and cheeks, the breath freer in her throat. Her secret had not been torn from her fearful heart; she had deepened the cloud that hung over Joe Newbolt’s head. “Let him blab now,” said she in her inner satisfaction. A man might say anything against a woman to save his neck; she was wise enough and deep enough, for all her shallowness, to know that people were quick to understand a thing like that.

  In passing back to her place beside her mother she had not looked at Joe. So she did not see the perplexity, anxiety, even reproach, which had grown in Joe’s eyes when she testified against him.

  “She had no need to do that,” thought Joe, sitting there in the glow of the prosecutor’s triumphant face. He had trusted Ollie to remain his friend, and, although she had told nothing but the truth concerning his rash threat against Isom, it seemed to him that she had done so with a studied intent of working him harm.

  His resentment rose against Ollie, urging him to betray her guilty relations with Morgan and strip her of the protecting mantle which he had wrapped about her at the first. He wondered whether Morgan had not come and entered into a conspiracy with her to shield themselves. In such case what would his unfolding of the whole truth amount to, discredited as he already was in the minds of the jurors by that foolish threat which he had uttered against Isom in the thin dawn of that distant day?

  Perhaps Alice had gone away, also, after hearing Ollie’s testimony, in the belief that he was altogether unworthy, and already branded with the responsibility for that old man’s death. He longed to look behind him and search the throng for her, but he dared not.

  Joe bowed his head, as one overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and shame, yet never doubting that he had acted for the best when he assumed the risk on that sad night to shield his master’s wife. It was a thing that a man must do, that a man would do again.

  He did not know that Alice Price, doubting not him, but the woman who had just left the witness-stand and resumed her place among the people, was that moment searching out the shallow soul of Ollie Chase with her accusing eyes. She sat only a little way from Ollie, in the same row of benches, beside the colonel. She turned a little in her place so she could see the young widow’s face when she came down from the stand with that new light in her eyes. Now she whispered to her father, and looked again, bending forward a little in a way that seemed impertinent, considering that it was Alice Price.

  Ollie was disconcerted by this attention, which drew other curious eyes upon her. She moved uneasily, making a bustle of arranging herself and her belongings in the seat, her heart troubled with the shadow of some vague fear.

  Why did Alice Price look at her so accusingly? Why did she turn to her father and nod and whisper that way? What did she know? What could she know? What was Joe Newbolt and his obscure life to Colonel Price’s fine daughter, sitting there dressed better than any other woman in the room? Or what was Isom Chase, his life, his death, or his widow, to her?

  Yet she had some interest beyond a passing curiosity, for Ollie could feel the concentration of these sober brown eyes upon her, even when she turned to avoid them. She recalled the interest that Colonel Price and his daughter had taken in Joe. People had talked of it at first. They couldn’t understand it any more than she could. The colonel and his daughter had visited Joe in jail, and carried books to him, and treated him as one upon their own level.

  What had Joe told them? Had the coward betrayed her?

  Ollie was assailed again by all her old, dread fears. What if they should get up and denounce her? With all of Colonel Price’s political and social influence, would not the public, and the judge and jury, believe Joe’s story if he should say it was true? She believed now that it was all arranged for Joe to denounce her, and that timid invasion of color was stemmed in her cheeks again.

  It was a lowering day, with a threat of unseasonable darkness in the waning afternoon. The judge looked at his watch; Captain Taylor stirred himself and pushed the shutters back from the two windows farthest from the bench, and let in more light.
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br />   People did not know just what was coming next, but the atmosphere of the room was charged with a foreboding of something big. No man would risk missing it by leaving, although rain was threatening, and long drives over dark roads lay ahead of many of the anxious listeners.

  Hammer was in consultation with Joe and his mother. He seemed to be protesting and arguing, with a mighty spreading of the hands and shaking of the head. The judge was writing busily, making notes on his charge to the jury, it was supposed.

  The prosecuting attorney took advantage of the momentary lull to get up and stretch his legs, which he did literally, one after the other, shaking his shanks to send down his crumpled pantaloons. He went to the window with lounging stride, hands in pockets, and pushed the sash a foot higher. There he stood, looking out into the mists which hung gray in the maple trees.

  The jurymen, tired and unshaved, and over the momentary thrill of Ollie’s disclosure, lolled and sprawled in the box. It seemed that they now accepted the thing as settled, and the prospect of further waiting was boresome. The people set up a little whisper of talk, a clearing of throats, a blowing of noses, a shifting of feet, a general preparation and readjustment for settling down again to absorb all that might fall.

  The country folk seated in the vicinity of Alice Price, among whom her fame had traveled far, whom many of their sons had loved, and languished for, and gone off to run streetcars on her account, turned their freed attention upon her, nudging, gazing, gossiping.

  “Purty as a picture, ain’t she?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You set her ’longside of Bessie Craver over at Pink Hill”–and so on.

  The judge looked up from his paper suddenly, as if the growing sound within the room had startled him out of his thought. His face wore a fleeting expression of surprise. He looked at the prosecutor, at the little group in conference at the end of the table below him, as if he did not understand. Then his judicial poise returned. He tapped with his pen on the inkstand.

  “Gentlemen, proceed with the case,” said he.