Part 13

“Shucks!” the officer incredulously commented. “Ef all I hev hearn o’ that sort to-day war true, thar ain’t a hearty, whoppin’ big man in Cherokee County but what’s got every disease from the chicken pip ter the yaller fever. Come on, Pete, an’ quit foolin’.”

Under the strong coercion of the law administered by a sheriff who wanted his supper, Rood could but go.

Despite his rapacious interest in all that concerned the tragedy, he had hitherto held aloof from the court-house; he had withdrawn himself even from the streets, fearing to meet the sheriff. Seeing the great yellow lights in the windows, each flaring in the rainy night like some many-faceted topaz, he had fancied that the trial must be well under way, for no gossip had come to him in his hiding-place of the difficulty of securing a jury. He could no longer resist his curiosity. He strode at his leisurely gait up the steps, meaning merely to glance within, when the sheriff issued upon him.

As he came with the officer into the room, Mink scanned him angrily, leaned forward, and whispered sharply to the lawyer. Rood was trembling in every fibre; the fixed gaze of all the crowd seemed to pierce him; his great eyes turned with a fluctuating, meaningless stare from one official to the other.

He was a freeholder, not a householder. He had expressed no opinion as to the guilt of the prisoner. Had he formed none? He had not thought about it. He was challenged by the defense on the score of personal enmity toward the prisoner, the peremptory challenges being exhausted. As he was otherwise eligible he was put upon his _voir dire_.

Harshaw looked steadily at him for a moment, his red lips curling, sitting with his arms folded across his broad chest. Mink’s bright, keen face close behind him was expectant, already triumphant. His hand was on the back of his counsel’s chair.

Suddenly Harshaw, tossing his hair from his brow, leaned forward, with his folded arms on the table before him.

“Did you not, sir,” he said, smacking his confident red lips, and with an exasperatingly deliberate delivery,—“did you not on the twentieth day of August ascend a certain summit of the Great Smoky Mountains called Piomingo Bald, and there”—he derisively thrust out his red tongue and withdrew it swiftly—“shoot and kill a certain cow, believing it to belong to Mink Lo—to Reuben Lorey?”

The judge’s eyes were fixed upon Rood. He seemed strangely agitated, shocked; his face assumed a ghastly pallor.

The attorney-general protested that the juror was not obliged to answer a question which tended to fasten disgrace, nay crime, upon him; Harshaw the while still leaning on the table, laughing silently, and looking with the roseate dimples of corpulent triumph at their discomfiture.

“The juror need not answer,” said the judge.

“I’m mighty willin’ ter answer, jedge,” gasped Rood. “I never done no sech thing sence I war born.”

In the estimation of all the crowd it was natural that he should say this; to accept the privilege of silence would be admission.

“Let me put another question in altogether another field,” said Harshaw, smoothing his yellow beard. “If it please the court to permit us to cite the decision of an inferior court, perhaps, but altogether beyond the jurisdiction of this honorable court, I should like to refer to the dicta in the courts of Cupid. Were not you and the prisoner suitors for the hand of the same young lady?”

It tickled him, to use a phrase most descriptive of the enjoyment he experienced, to describe in this inflated manner the humble “courtin’” of the mountaineers. There was a broad smile on many of the faces within the bar, the townspeople relishing particularly a joke of this character on the mountain folks. The judge’s discerning gray eye was fixed upon him as his pink laugh expanded, his peculiarly red lips showing his strong white teeth.

“Yes, sir, we war,” Rood admitted. He was calm now; his agitation had excited no comment; it was to be expected in a man surprised, confounded, and dismayed by so serious a charge.

“You were! How interesting! Go where you may, the world’s the same! The charmer spreads her snare even up in the cove! And you and Reuben Lorey fell together in it, two willing victims. And as he got the best of it, as the lady preferred him, it would be natural that you should have some little grudge against him, hey?”

“I dunno how he got the best of it,” said Rood sharply. “I ain’t got no grudge agin him fur that. ’Twar jes’ yestiddy she sent me word by her mother ter kem back; she war jes’ foolin’ Mink.”

He was evidently glad to tell it; he did not care even for the giggle in the crowd.

The lawyer was abashed for a moment, and Mink, so long accustomed to be rated a breaker of hearts, a lady-killer, was grievously cut down. In all the episodes of that day which had so bristled with animosity this was the first moment that his spirit flagged, despite that he had never heretofore cared for Elvira,—did not care for her now.

Rood hardly was aware how the examination was tending; in the interests of self-defense he had overlooked its purpose. He stood staring with blank amaze when the judge’s voice ended the discussion.

“The juror is competent,” he said.

The two remaining talesmen being unchallenged, the jury was duly impaneled and sworn.

The court was adjourned. The sleepy crowd filed out into the streets, the lights in the court-house windows disappeared, and a dark and vacant interval ensued.

XI.

The morning dawned with a radiant disdain of mists. The wind was buoyant, elated. The yellow sunshine, in its vivid perfection, might realize to the imagination the light that first shone upon the world when God saw that it was good. The air was no insipid fluid, breathed unconsciously. It asserted its fragrance and freshness in every respiration. It stirred the pulses like some rare wine; it seemed, indeed, the subtle distillation of all the fruitage of the year, enriched with the bouquet of the summer, and reminiscent of the delicate languors of the spring. The sky had lifted itself to empyreal heights, luminously blue, with occasional faint fleckings of fleecy vapors. The white summits of the mountains were imposed against it with a distinctness that nullified distance; even down their slopes, beyond the limits of the snowfall, the polychromatic vestiges of autumn were visible, with no crudity of color in these sharp contrasts, but with a soft blending of effect. Within the court-house great blocks of sunshine fell upon the floor through the dirty panes. Several of the sashes were thrown up to admit the air. The rusty stove stood cold and empty. Many a day had passed since the spider-webs that hung from the corners of the ceiling and draped the bare windows of the great room had been disturbed. They might suggest to the contemplative mind analogies to the labyrinthine snares of the law, where the intrusive flies perish miserably, and the spiders batten. On one of the window-panes a blue-bottle climbed the glass, intent on some unimagined achievement; always slipping when near the top, and falling buzzing drearily to the bottom, to recommence his laborious ascent in the sunshine. Sometimes he would fly away, droning in melancholy disgust, presently returning and renewing his futile efforts. He was a fine moral example of perverted powers, and might well be commended to the notice of human malcontents,—by nature fitted to soar, but sighing for feats of pedestrianism. In contrast with the day in its alertness, its intense brilliancy, yesterday was blurred, dim, like some distorted dream hardly worth crediting as a portent. It might need as attestation of its reality the jury which it had brought forth. They were all early in their places, having been sequestered in charge of the sheriff, and having slept as it were under the wing of the law. The privilege accorded by law, in phrase of munificent bestowal,—to be tried by a jury of one’s peers,—seems at times a gigantic practical joke, perpetrated by justice on simple humanity. They were indeed Mink’s peers so far as ignorance, station,—for most of them were mountaineers,—poverty, and prejudice might suffice. Few were so intelligent, but none so lawless. Most of them were serving under protest, indifferent to the dignity of the great engine of justice which they represented. The two or three who showed willingness were suspected, either by the defense or the prosecution, of occult motives. All looked unkempt, stolid, dogged, even surlily stupid, as they sat in two rows, chewing as with one gesture. Gradually, however, they visibly brightened under the bland courtesy of Mr. Kenbigh, the attorney for the State, who took early occasion to say—and he paraphrased the remark more than once in the course of the day—that he had never had the pleasure of trying a case before so intelligent a jury, or one to whom the sacred interests of justice could be so safely entrusted. Harshaw, too, deported himself toward them with a mollifying suavity which, to judge from his ordinary manner, would have seemed impossible. He had a very pretty wit, of a rough and extravagant style, that greatly commended him to them and relieved the irksomeness of their duress. Mink had evidently been tutored in regard to his demeanor toward them. He forbore to scowl at Pete Rood with the fierce dismay his face had worn when he saw his enemy sworn on the preceding night. But his dissembling was limited. He simply would not look at Rood at all. There was an unaffected confidence, almost indifference, upon his handsome face that occasioned much comment. It had already been rumored among the bar, thence percolating through the town at large, that the defense had discovered important testimony at the last moment, but that for some reason Harshaw had desired to apply for a continuance. The prisoner, it was said, had protested, and refused downright, declaring that by nightfall, by to-morrow at farthest, he would be on his way to his home in Hazel Valley. This rumor gave an added interest to the moment when the witnesses were brought in to be sworn and put under the rule. The crowd scanned each with a fruitless conjecture as to which possessed the potent and significant knowledge on which the defense relied. Several of them were women, demure as nuns in their straight skirts and short waists and long, tunnel-like sun-bonnets. The mountain men strode in, and stared about them freely, and were very bold, in contrast to these decorous associates, with their grave, downcast eyes and pale, passionless faces. The book was held toward the witnesses, two or three were instructed to put their hands upon it, and then the clerk, in a voice that might have proceeded from an automaton, so wooden was the tone and elocution, recited the oath with a swiftness that seemed profane. The group stood half in the slanting sunbeams, half in the brown shadow, close about the clerk’s desk. Among the tall, muscular figures of the mountain men and the pallid, attenuated elder women was Alethea, looking like some fine illusion of the dusky shadow and gilded sunshine, with her golden hair and her brown homespun dress. How shining golden her hair, how exquisitely fresh and pure her face, how deep and luminous and serious her brown eyes, showed as never before. Somehow she was embellished by the incongruity of the sordid surroundings of the court-room, the great, haggard, unkempt place, and the crude ugliness of its frequenters. Her face was fully revealed, for she had pushed back her bonnet that she might kiss the book. As she took it from the clerk’s hand and pressed her lips to it, Mink’s heart stirred with a thrill it had never before known. He was entering as a discoverer upon a new realm of feeling. He experienced a subtle astonishment at the turbulence, the fierceness, of his own emotion.

The judge was looking at her!

Gwinnan’s hand still held his pen. His head was still bent over the paper on which he wrote. The casual side-glance of those discerning gray eyes was prolonged into a steady gaze of surprise. He did not finish the word he was writing. He laid the pen down presently. He watched her openly, unconsciously, as she gave back the book, and as she walked with the other witnesses into the adjoining room to await the calling of her name.

Mink could hardly analyze this strange emotional capacity, this new endowment, that had come to him, so amazed was he by its unwonted presence. He had not known that he could feel jealousy. He could not identify it when it fell upon him. He had been so supreme in Alethea’s heart, so arrogantly sure of its possession, that he had not cared for Ben Doaks’s hopeless worship from afar; it did not even add to her consequence in his eyes. But that this stranger of high degree—he would not have phrased it thus, for he had been reared in ignorance of the distinction of caste, yet he instinctively recognized it in the judge’s power, his isolated official prominence, his utter removal from all the conditions of the mountaineer’s world—that _this_ man should look at her with that long, wondering gaze, should lay down his pen, forgetting the word he was to write!

Mink felt a terrible pang of isolation. For the first time Alethea was in his mind as an independent identity, subject to influences he could scarcely gauge, perhaps harboring thoughts in which he had no share. Her love for him had hitherto served for him as an expression of her whole nature. He had never recognized other possibilities. Even her continual pleas that he should take heed of the error of his ways he had esteemed as evidence of her absorption in him, her eager, earnest aspiration for his best good; she would endure his displeasure rather than forego aught that might inure to his welfare. He had felt no gratitude that she had come to rescue him, as she had often done, never so sorely needed as now; it had seemed to him natural that she should bestir herself, since she loved him so. The first doubt of the permanence and pervasiveness of this paramount affection stirred within him. He wondered if she had noticed the man’s look, if she were flattered by it. He sought to reassure himself. “Lethe jes’ bogues along, though, seein’ nuthin’, studyin’ ’bout suthin’ else; mebbe she never noticed. But ef Mis’ Purvine hed been hyar, or Mis’ Sayles, I be bound, they’d hev seen it, an’ tole her, too, else they ain’t the wimmen I take ’em fur.” He marveled whether Gwinnan had thought she was pretty. He himself had always accounted her a fairly “good-lookin’ gal,” but no better favored than Elvira Crosby.

He had had no fear of the result of the case since he had known of Alethea’s strange glimpse of Tad; he was, too, in a moral sense, infinitely relieved by the circumstance. Otherwise he might not have been able to entertain a train of thought so irrelevant to the testimony which was being given by the witnesses for the State. He heard it only casually, although he now and then languidly joined the general smile that rewarded some happy hit of Harshaw’s. These pleasantries were chiefly elicited in cross-examining the witnesses for the State, and in wrangles with the attorney-general as to the admissibility of evidence. Kenbigh, with a determination of purple wrath to his bald head, would in his stentorian roar call aloud upon his authorities with a reverent faith as if they were calendared saints. More than once the court ruled against him, when it seemed appropriate in his next remark to drop his voice to a rumbling basso profundo. He maintained due respect for the judge and showed a positive affection for the jury, but the very sight of Harshaw would excite him to an almost bovine expression of rage,—the florid counsel being like a red rag to a bull. At first the only point which Harshaw seemed desirous to make was that none of the witnesses had attached any importance to Mink’s threats, the afternoon of the shooting match, to “bust down the mill,” until they heard of the disaster. He tried, too, to induce them to admit that Mink was a good fellow in the main. The tragic results, however, of his late mischief had given a new and serious interpretation to all his previous pranks, and the witnesses were more likely to furnish supplemental instances of freakish malice and the mischievous ingenuity of his intentional reprisals than to palliate his jocose capers. One old man, a by-stander at the shooting match, was especially emphatic, even venomous. Harshaw involved him in a sketch of what he considered a young man should be. When asked where he had ever known such a man he naively confessed,—himself, “whenst I war young.”

Harshaw found it much safer to take the aggressive. He played upon the alternating fears which Mink’s comrades entertained of the revenuers and the moonshiners. He seemed to question rather _pro forma_ than with the expectation of eliciting serious results, and to amuse himself with the involutions and contradictions in which he contrived to enmesh them, in replying to his questions as to their sobriety that night in the woods, what they had to drink, how much it required to make them drunk.

To the witness it was not a reassuring playfulness. Harshaw looked very formidable as he sat, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, both hands clasping the lapels of his coat. Whenever he made a point he smacked his confident red lips.

“You were perfectly sober that night?”

The witness virtuously assented.

“And why shouldn’t you be,” said the crafty Harshaw, “when we all know there is no still but the God-fearing bonded still in the whole country! Look at the jury, and tell them that you were not drinking that night.”

The unfortunate witness faltered that he _had_ been drinking some.

“You had!” exclaimed Harshaw, with the accents of surprise. “And yet you say, on oath, that you were sober. Now what do you call sober? We must inquire into this. What do you take? I wish I could put that question as it should be between gentlemen, but”—he waved his fat hand—“some other day.”

The witness stared dumbly at him, and the crowd grinned.

“Let me put the question in another form. How much of the reverend stuff is enough to settle you? A pint?”

The witness gallantly declared that he could stand a pint.

“A jugful?”

“Oh, naw, sir,”—meaning a jugful would not be necessary.

In the staccato of affected amaze, “_Barrelful!_”

The badgered witness protested and explained, and Harshaw asked, lowering his voice, as if it were exceedingly important, “Now, did that whiskey taste like _brush_ whiskey?”

As the quaking, shock-headed country lout replied, the facetious counsel recoiled.

“What! you tell this honorable court, and this intelligent jury, and this upright and learned and teetotaling attorney for the State, that you don’t know the difference in the taste between the illicit corn juice of the mountains and the highly honorable, pure, rectified liquor, taxed and stamped, made and drunk, under the auspices of this great, good, and glorious government!”

The judge, who had watched Harshaw with a dilated, gleaming gray eye and a quivering nostril, spoke abruptly.

“The court will not longer tolerate this buffoonery,” he drawled. “Counsel may cross-examine witness, and if he has _nothing_ to say he may be silent.”

Harshaw flushed deeply. He had always enjoyed certain privileges as a wit. Judge Averill, who loved a joke for its own gladsome sake, had often permitted him to transcend decorum. He had no idea, however, of figuring as the butt of his own ridicule. He was a quick fellow, and took what advantage was possible of the situation. “If it please your Honor,” he said, rising to address the judge, and with an air of great courtesy, “I will waive the right of cross-examination, since my methods fail in satisfying the court.”

Gwinnan looked at him with thinly veiled antagonism. Harshaw relapsed into his tilted chair, still lightly holding his lapels, that favorite posture of rural gentlemen, listening with an air of polite but incidental attention to the attorney-general’s examination of the next witness, and declining with a wave of his fat hand to cross-examine.

A stir of excitement pervaded the bar; great interest was aroused in the audience. An old farmer, sitting on one of the benches, holding one treasured knee in both hands, put his foot on the floor to take care of itself, and leaned forward in breathless eagerness to lose no word. Others, who had been less attentive, were nudging one another, and asking what had been said. Again and again, as the successive witnesses were turned over to the defense for cross-examination, and the lawyer waved his pudgy hand, there was a suppressed sensation. His freak of silence had the effect of greatly expediting matters, and the attorney-general announced before the adjournment for dinner that he had no more witnesses to call.

In conducting the examination of the defendant’s witnesses Harshaw was extremely grave. He had an excited gleam in his eye, a flurried, precipitate manner, as he went on. Now and then he nodded his head, and tossed back his mane of yellow hair as if it were heavy and harassed him. He still sat in the big, important posture he liked to assume, but every glance was full of an acute anxiety.

Mink strove again to fix his mind on the testimony. Over and over it wandered. He only knew vaguely that his best friends were assuring the jury that his escapades were all in mirth and naught in malice, and instancing as indications of his deeper nature all the good turns he had ever done. He was a loose-handed fellow. He had no thrifty instincts, and perhaps because he valued lightly he gave freely. But the habit, such as it might be, was displayed to the jury under the guise of generosity.

The sunlight now slanting upon the walls had turned to a deep golden-red hue, for the early sunset was close at hand. Through a western window one might see the great vermilion sphere, begirt with a horizontal band of gray cloud, and sinking down into the dun-colored uncertainties about the horizon. The yellow hickory-tree beside the window showed through its thinning leaves the graceful symmetry of its black boughs. The room was dropping into a mellow duskiness, hardly obscurity, for as yet the soft light was sufficient to make all objects distinct in the midst of the gathering shadow,—the lawyers, the prisoner, the tousled heads of the audience, the attentive jury, the unwearied judge. Harshaw could even read his own handwriting as he looked at the list he held, and said, “Mr. Sheriff, call Alethea Sayles.”

“Alethea Sayles,” roared Mr. Sheriff at the door, as if Alethea Sayles were “beyond the seas” and hard of hearing besides, instead of waiting expectantly in the adjoining room, ten steps away.