Part 9

To the negro miner, seven miles up at the town of Welch, this rugged crossing, studded with great bowlders, was respectfully referred to as “Hell's Gap,”--respectfully, for no other reason than that the negroes were superstitious, and the mammoth gorge, silent as the grave floor, and deep and foggy except in the long summer afternoons, was calculated to conjure every grim phantom set down in the African catalogue.

The sheriff pulled up his “dun” horse suddenly, and threw his leg over the pommel of his saddle. Just below him in the ford of the river was a man wading out into the water,--a tall mountaineer, bare-headed, his dress indicating a rather equal compromise between the barbarity of the village and the barbarity of the mountain. For upper garment he wore the red-fringed hunting shirt of his fathers and his grandfathers and on; and for nether garment, the blue overalls purchased at the country store for a haunch of venison or a bundle of hides. The mountaineer was tall, rugged, and powerful,--a proper inhabitant for such a place.

“Spitler Hamrick,” murmured the sheriff.

“By every limping god! The toughest pine knot in the mountains of McDowell. I wonder what the old wolf is looking for.”

Then he tightened his knee on the pommel of the saddle and a slow smile crept over the features of the sheriff. “By my troth'” he drawled, “it is certain that Spitler is no Vere de Vere. Still, if blue blood ran to back, and bunches of muscles on the shoulders, Spitler's claim to princely lineage would be unquestioned.”

White Carter stopped short, and adjusted his eye-glasses. The mountaineer had gathered up a bundle from the river and was turning to wade ashore. The man did not at once see the sheriff; he was looking down into the water in order to avoid slipping on the smooth stones. When he stepped on to the rocky bank of the river, the sheriff called. At the sound, the mountaineer dropped the bundle and jerked up a Winchester that lay nearby against a bowlder. It was an act after the custom of the mountains. One armed himself first, and observed the “lay of the land” afterwards.

White Carter remained perfectly motionless. “I would n't shoot, Spitler,” he drawled, “it's vulgar.”

The mountaineer dropped the butt of his rifle on the stones, and looked up in astonishment. “Smoky hell!” ejaculated the mountaineer, “it air the sheriff. Smoky hell!” The refrain was a nervous idiom with Spitler Hamrick.

White Carter put his hand into the pocket of his coat, took out a pipe, knocked the ashes from the bowl and began to fill it with great deliberation. This act, remaining after the red man had passed, proclaimed a status of dignified truce.

The play of action faded from Hamrick's face, leaving it stolid, heavy, prodigiously indifferent. It was the mountain's stamp on its minion, the silence, and the abominable indifference of the rugged earth ground into the faces of the men who struggle for life on her stony breast.

“Hot,” observed the sheriff, crowding the bowl of his pipe and thrusting the tobacco down with his broad thumb.

The mountaineer folded his arms over the muzzle of his rifle and leaned upon it heavily.

“Yas,” he responded, “warmish,”

It was the full measure of salutation, and the full measure of introduction to all matters, important or unimportant, on the watershed of the Alleghanies. In the mountains no man hurried with his speech. There was time to be fully understood, and time to answer fully; then what one did afterwards, one was not so likely to regret. In the flat lands men are not so wise, perhaps.

The sheriff struck a match on his saddle skirt, lighted his pipe, and puffed a cloud of blue smoke rings out over the placid ears of the “murky dun.” Presently he took the pipe stem from between his teeth and looked down at the solitary proprietor of Jim's Ford.

“Spitler,” he drawled, “what 's in the bundle?”

“Ye kin look,” responded the mountaineer with prodigious unconcern.

The sheriff replaced his pipe and lapsed into silence for a moment. Then he said:

“Where did you find it, Spitler?”

“I reckin ye saw,” replied the scion of the house of Hamrick.

The guardian of order looked up at the blue sky over the top of his nose glasses. Then he looked down. “Spitler,”--he said softly.

The mountaineer interrupted. “Sheriff,” he growled, “old Spitler Hamrick don't stand no shammackin' round the bush. Smoky hell! He aint never stood it. Things air goin' to be like this: ye kin mosey' down here and git this bundle, air ye kin ride on. But ye can't set on you hoss and jaw. Smoky hell! Ye can't set on you hoss and jaw.”

There was no circumlocution, no trick of equivocation, no shadow of obscurity in the speech of the denizen of Hell's Gap He used words for the purpose of expressing exactly what he believed to be true, and for no other purpose. This the sheriff knew, and others had learned and remembered by certain long glistening scars, covered afterward with the red flannel of their hunting shirts.

White Carter removed his knee from the pommel of his saddle and slipped down to the ground. Here he paused for a moment, knocked the ashes from his pipe and replaced it in his pocket. Then he clambered down the steep bank to the river. The proprietor of Jim's Ford looked on with mighty indifference. The sheriff took up the bundle without a word, returned to his horse, and unbuckling the “throat latch” of his bridle, strapped the bundle to the horn of his saddle. Then he placed his right foot in the stirrup and turned to the mountaineer.

“Spitler,” he drawled, “we found a dead man in Tug the other day. I think this is his coat.”

The mountaineer looked up from the muzzle of his Winchester. “Were there lead in him?” he asked.

The sheriff flung his leg over the saddle and gathered up his bridle from the horse's neck.

“No bullet holes,” he answered.

“Then,” said the giant Hamrick, “he were not killed in the hills.”

IV

IT was the first Monday of July, and the grand inquisitors of the county of McDowell were in laborious session. It was hot in Welch,--so hot that the sheriff had purchased a linen coat and departed for Atlantic City on a ten-dollar excursion, leaving the deputy, Salathiel Jenkins, to swelter with the grand jury. So hot that J. E. B. Huron, prosecuting attorney by selection of the Commonwealth, resorted to expressions not quite profane but nipping close to the border. So hot that the foreman from Charity Fork made continual odious reference to that historic locality over which Lazarus passed in the bosom of Abraham.

The grand jury was a body mightily out of harmony with its inquisitorial affairs, especially on this sweltering Monday when the mercury was mounting heavenward. The members of the grand jury had removed their coats, they had unbuttoned their shirts, they had rolled up their sleeves to the limit over their great brown arms. It was hot--this grand jury. But it was jovial and good-natured, sixteen freeholders of the bailiwick turning aside for a day to bolster up the peace and dignity of the State. The characteristic apparel of the farmer, the hunter, and the miner was on this grand jury, but there were no collars; not even the “biled shirt” of notorious report. If one had spoken of a haberdasher or essayed to enumerate his wares in the land south of Tug River, he would have been regarded as a purveyor of “green furrin jabber,” or been pitied as a hopeless victim of idiot mutterings.

Thus do men hoot the customs of their fellows when in conflict with their own. One looking at this grand jury as an exhibit would have gone away regretting that the chief fad of Delilah had not been handed down in the county of McDowell, just as the jury would have wondered why the funny little man divided his hair in the middle like a woman and wore a tight band around his neck and a stiff breastplate of cloth and starch over his ribs, when he could dress like a Christian, and be comfortable.

At two o'clock the sage body had concluded its inquisition, and was resting ponderously while the foreman. Abe Collister, of Charity Fork, was slowly and with infinite pain affixing his signature to the indictments. It was no small labor for one whose fingers were thick and broad and accustomed to implements little slighter in proportion than the handle of an axe or the stock of a Winchester.

The facial contortions of this good freeholder as he strove in a clerical capacity would have won for him applause and fortune and wide repute in the cast of a comedy. It was Fate's way, better than genius could imitate, but no audience to see.

It is the function of bodies of this sort to be severe, and it is their way to be most amiable. The prosecuting attorney, it was maintained, ought to know what he wanted. He was paid to know. It was his business. If he thought it wise to send in witnesses charging one with a crime, then the charge should be found. This conclusion was a splendid working hypothesis, pregnant with expedition, but not quite in accord with the ideal _jus_.

So the grand jury rested as the afternoon grew apace, while the scripturian from Charity Fork toiled, and the prosecuting attorney went down to his office in order to “see if there was anything else he wanted.” It was at this hour of lull, that a nervous little man hurried into the office presided over by the industrious daughter of the house of McFadden, and inquired for Mr. Huron. The red genius replied that he was busy. According to this oracle, young Mr. Huron was always busy. His continual status was one of tireless toil,--as continuous as a mortgage, and as tireless as a gas meter.

Just then the prosecuting attorney came out on his way to the grand jury room. The little man rushed up and demanded an immediate audience. The two returned to the private office and closed the door. Here the little man looked at his watch and announced that things would have to be rushed, and launched into the subject. He explained with almost breathless rapidity that he was a detective from New York, representing Loomey's Agency. As he talked, he threw back his coat revealing a badge which Mr. Huron did not stop to examine. He said that he had been working on the case of Brown Hirst; that he had finally discovered that Hirst had been murdered, foully murdered by one Robert Gilmore, president of the Octagon Coal Company; that he had the case tightened around Gilmore beyond the remotest shadow of probability; that Gilmore, it seemed, had by some means learned of the damning evidence gathering against him, and was attempting to fly from the country; that he had left Philadelphia disguised as a cattle drover, and would pass through Chares-ton, West Virginia, at midnight on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and if he was not then arrested, he would probably escape entirely, or, at the least, subject his trailer to the expense and the tedium of an extradition; hence the detective had hurried to Welch in order to secure an indictment at once and return to Charleston in a position to arrest the man and hold him under a legal warrant that would be valid and unquestioned.

He explained that he must leave at three o'clock in order to reach the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in time, and requested that he be permitted to go at once before the grand-jury, which he had learned was now in session.

The prosecuting attorney listened in astonishment, but he was a man familiar with the startling surprises of criminal investigation, and he set himself to act with the expedition which the matter required. He went at once to the grand jury with the detective, and explained that he had just received information tending to the conclusion that Brown Hirst had been murdered; that the witness with him was John Bartlett, a detective from New York, who had worked up the case and would give full information concerning the facts of the crime. He then added that as Mr. Bartlett would be compelled to leave within the hour, he would return to his office and prepare an indictment for murder. In the meantime the grand jury could determine whether the information was sufficient to sustain the charge, and, if so, the indictment would be ready and Mr. Bartlett could return to Charleston without unnecessary delay.

Then he withdrew, and the grand jury of McDowell, braced by the gust of sudden sensation, straightway forgot how very warm it was and began to put itself into a state of ponderous bovine expectancy.

The witness Bartlett sat down by the table, took out his watch, looked at it anxiously, then snapped the case and returned it to his pocket.

The foreman put down his pen very carefully, mopped his wet face with a great red cotton cloth, and strove to assume the gravity of his position.

“Your name's Bartlett, stranger?” said the scripturian, feeling that it was becoming for him to set the wheels of judicial investigation in motion, but not quite certain of the method. “You are a detective man: and I 'low you know all about this here little trouble?”

The latter part of the query was a stock question with the foreman. All day long, every crime, from homicide to assault and battery, had been dubbed by this arch inquisitor as “this here little trouble.” If there was any big trouble south of Tug River, it was not deemed to be within the purlieus of the _lex scripta_ or the _lex non scripta_ of the county of McDowell.

The detective saw the open opportunity to thrust in his testimony as a narrative, and seized it. He leaned over on the table, assured himself of the attention of the jury, and began to talk.

He told how he had trailed this matter down; how the Octagon Coal Company was financially on the verge of ruin, and it was his theory that Gilmore, as president, had been stealing largely from the company; that Hirst had finally suspected this theft and had summoned Gilmore to McDowell; how the dangerous man had obeyed the summons, had quarrelled with Hirst in the office, finally killed him, and in order to cover the crime had carried the body to the bridge and thrown it over, arranging the evidence to appear like a suicide. He painted in lurid colors the desperate character of this man Gilmore; he pointed out how fearful of arrest the murderer of Hirst was, at that very hour hurrying westward in order, as he believed, to put himself beyond the reach of the law.

The witness talked on glib and shrewdly, and while he talked, the jury, unfamiliar with the rules of evidence, grew indignant and bitter, and fired with a sense of the gigantic outrage.

Presently the door opened and the prosecuting attorney entered with the indictment.

“Are you ready to vote on the matter, gentlemen?” he asked.

The foreman nodded slowly. “I guess we are, Jeb,” he answered.

“Then,” responded the prosecuting attorney, “Mr. Bartlett and myself will withdraw.”

The witness arose and followed Mr Huron out of the jury room.

When the door had closed, the chief inquisitor from Charity Fork picked up the indictment., turned it over curiously in his ponderous hand, and then laid it down on the table with the back up. Then he took up his pen and jabbed it down into the ink pot.

“Boys,” he observed, cheerily, “the Good Book says, 'None shall escape, no not one.' What about this here one?”

“I reckon,” drawled Uriah Coburn, sage and philosopher, and most venerable member from Injun Run, “I reckon the Good Book air right, I reckon we better flop him.”

“Flop” was an accurate idiom in McDowell, and, being translated, meant, “to throw heavily.”

To this the grand jury agreed with many and various methods of assent. So the member from Charity Fork took a new grip on his pen, thrust his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, and slowly and with great labor inscribed on the back of the indictment this legend, big with the injured dignity of the Commonwealth: “A True Bill. Abraham Collister, Foreman.”

V

AT high noon on the following day Salathiel Jenkins, chief deputy of the absent Carter, was a voluble factor in McDowell. He explained with many a dash of color just how “me and Bartlett” had taken the fleeing Gilmore from a midnight train and transported him to the jail at Welch, where he now languished. How brave they had been, how expeditious, and how marvellously successful in each of their desperate moves. Salathiel Jenkins was a young person who considered himself of huge importance to the economy of nature,--an opinion with which the world at large failed to concur. The conservative Carter had expressed it all long ago when he remarked with immense gravity that Salathiel Jenkins was not wise. But the deputy's potential was high, and he talked. He explained that the prisoner had employed legal counsel, with whom he had been in consultation since his arrival in the town. He explained that Mr. Bartlett had advised the prosecuting attorney to force the case to a trial at once in order to avoid an application for bail, and in order to prevent the prisoner from being unduly assisted by any accomplice he might have in the East.

He explained that the evidence against Gilmore was overpowering, that there were witnesses who knew something of the matter, and he had the subpoenas in his pocket.

He explained that John Bartlett was the greatest detective in the Republic, and that the days on earth of Robert Gilmore were growing lamentably short. The self-importance of young Mr. Jenkins gushed and bubbled and expanded until it threatened to bulge his anatomical proportions, and he talked and he talked. He descanted with acrimonious criticism upon the fact that Mr. Huron had asked for time in which to examine the evidence, and that he and the great Bartlett had labored to convince him that the case should be put to trial at once, and that they had had a lot of trouble, but that it was all right now, and when court convened in the morning the case would be called and pushed, and he gloried in the fact that he and Bartlett had assumed large responsibility for this splendid expedition.

It thus came about that the court-room was so crowded on the following morning that the judge as he came down to his bench had literally to elbow his way through. The details of this morning's procedure demonstrated that while the deputy Jenkins had talked he had been telling the truth. After the docket was called, the prosecuting attorney arose and requested that a jury be empanelled for the trial of the case of the State vs. Gilmore.

The judge expressed some surprise at this unusual haste, and intimated that if an objection was urged he would continue the case to a later day of the term. To his surprise, however, counsel for Gilmore replied that he was quite ready for trial.

Whereupon a jury was had and the case ordered to proceed. The opening statement of the prosecuting attorney was frank. It gave the history of the case as he had heard it from Bartlett, admitting freely that he had been unable to investigate the matter personally, but upon his information he was convinced that the prisoner was guilty.

To this the counsel for Gilmore replied that the State was laboring under a stupendous delusion; that Mr. Gilmore was a gentleman of standing, and that it would quickly appear that there was no cause for subjecting his client to the odium of a criminal prosecution.

The spectators were not a little disgusted with the tame proceedings. They had expected a keen and spirited struggle with the startling thrusts and parries of a bitter legal affair. They had hoped to hear the steel grate, and to see the blades dart forward and bend and fly back, as the champion of the State and its enemy strove for some master vantage. They hoped for the fierce interests and the quick sharp thrills incident to the grim fight of a desperate criminal for his liberty and his life, and they were disgusted.

Their strong pugnacious spirit sympathized with Gilmore and damned his counsel. In the picturesque speech of an auditor from “Dog Skin,” “The lawyer was a quitter.”

The case progressed with almost exasperating insipidity.

The prosecuting attorney proceeded with great deliberation, and with the air of one who maintains a thunderbolt in reserve. He proved the death of Brown Hirst by the coroner and others; he introduced the books of the company showing its financial standing; and put in such other matters of unimportant evidence as were easily at hand. To all this the counsel for Gilmore made no objection. To the observer, he was stupidly indifferent.

The prosecuting attorney then placed the detective John Bartlett on the stand. Bartlett explained with great volubility that he was a member of Latency's Detective Agency; that he had learned of the mysterious death of Brown Hirst, and hoping to obtain the reward offered by Hirst's widow, had gone to her and requested permission to investigate the case. He explained that he had learned that the Octagon Coal Company was in desperate financial straits; that the president, Robert Gilmore, who resided in the city of Philadelphia, had been in the county of McDowell on the night of Hirst's death, and from these data he had formulated his theory to the effect that Gilmore had been stealing from the company; that this fact had been discovered by Hirst, and that they had come together in McDowell for the purpose of discussing this matter; that there the two men had quarrelled, and the result was that Hirst had been killed and his body thrown into the river, and the evidence of suicide manufactured by Robert Gilmore.

The detective explained further that being advised that Robert Gilmore intended to leave Philadelphia for St. Louis, and fearing that it was an attempt on the part of the president of the Octagon Coal Company to escape from the country, he had hurried to McDowell and secured an indictment.

Upon cross-examination it at once appeared that this detective had no knowledge of any fact whatever, but was merely speaking from certain conclusions which he was pleased to call his theory. The attorney for the defense moved to strike out the evidence of this witness, which was accordingly done, much to the chagrin of John Bartlett, detective, and Salathiel Jenkins, deputy-in-extraordinary to the sheriff of McDowell.

The prosecuting attorney then proceeded to spring his sensation. He announced to the court that during the night Gilmore had made a confession to Mr. Jenkins, the deputy, and that he desired to have Mr. Jenkins sworn and his testimony introduced. Accordingly the irrepressible Jenkins, by virtue of an oath properly administered, was transformed into a witness for the State of West Virginia.

Before the witness was permitted to launch into his marvellous story of the self-condemnation of Robert Gilmore, the attorney for the defense arose and demanded permission to inquire into the circumstances under which the alleged confession had been obtained. The judge replied that such inquiry was entirely proper, and the attorney for the defense began.

The ways of Providence are without premonition. At the first onslaught of the attorney for Gilmore, the importance of the testimony of Salathiel Jenkins vanished like a New Year's resolution. Yes, he had gone to the prisoner together with John Bartlett; he had explained that he was the deputy sheriff of the county of McDowell; that he was a person of influence; that the prisoner was in grave peril; and that, if a full confession were made, he, Jenkins, would induce the authorities of the law to deal leniently with the prisoner. He was a person of importance, he said, and, in the absence of the sheriff, the first guardian of all the law and order in the county of McDowell; if the prisoner would confess, he, Salathiel Jenkins, could save him from the hangman, and he would do it.

These were the conditions under which the alleged confession was made.