Chapter 12

"And, gentlemen of this jury, I propose to prove to your absolute satisfaction that this defendant, Jeffrey Whiting, did wilfully and with prepared design, murder Samuel Rogers on the morning of August twentieth last. I shall not only prove to you the existence of a long-standing hatred harboured by this defendant against the murdered man, but I will show to you a direct motive for the crime. And I shall not only prove circumstantially to you that he and no other could have done the deed but I shall also convict him out of the unwilling mouths of his friends and neighbours who were, to all intents and purposes, actual eye-witnesses of the crime."

In the red sandstone courthouse of Racquette County the District Attorney of the county was opening the case for the State against Jeffrey Whiting, charged with the murder of Samuel Rogers, who had died by the hand of Rafe Gadbeau that grim morning on the side of Bald Mountain.

From early morning the streets of Danton, the little county seat of Racquette County, had been filled with the wagons and horses of the hill people who had come down for this, the second day of the trial. Yesterday the jury had been selected. They were all men of the villages and of the one little city of Racquette County, men whose lives or property had never been endangered by forest fires. Judge Leslie in questioning them and in ruling their selection had made it plain that the circumstances surrounding the killing of the man Rogers must have no weight in their minds. They must be prepared to judge the guilt or innocence of the prisoner purely on the charge of murder itself, with no regard for what rumour might say the victim had been doing at the time.

For the prisoner, it seemed unfortunate that the man had been killed just a mile or so within the line of Racquette County. Only a little of the extreme southeastern corner of that county had been burned over in the recent fire and in general it had meant very little to these people. In Tupper County where Jeffrey Whiting had lived and which had suffered terribly from the fire it should have been nearly impossible to select a jury which would have been willing to convict the slayer of Rogers under the circumstances. But to the people of the villages of Racquette County the matter did not come home. They only knew that a man had been killed up the corner of the county. A forest fire had started at about the same time and place. But few people had any clear version of the story. And there seemed to be little doubt as to the identity of the slayer.

There was another and far more potent reason why it was unfortunate for Jeffrey Whiting that Samuel Rogers had died within the lines of Racquette County. The Judge who sat upon the bench was the same man who only a few weeks before had pleaded so unctuously before the Senate committee for the rights of the downtrodden U. & M. Railroad against the lawless people of the hills. He had given the District Attorney every possible assistance toward the selection of a jury who would be at least thoughtful of the interests of the railroad. For this was not merely a murder trial. It was the case of the people of the hills against the U. & M. Railroad.

Racquette County was a "railroad" county. The life of every one of its rising villages depended absolutely upon the good will of the railroad system that had spread itself beneficently over the county and that had given it a prosperity beyond that of any other county of the North. Racquette County owed a great deal to the railroad, and it was not in the disposition or the plans of the railroad to leave the county in a position where it might forget the debt. So the railroad saw to it that only men personally known to its officials should have public office in the county. It had put this judge upon this bench. And the railroad was no niggard to its servants. It paid him well for the very timely and valuable services which he was able to render it.

The grip which the railroad corporation had upon the life of Racquette County was so complex and varied that it extended to every money-making affair in the community. It was an intangible but impenetrable mesh of interests and influences that extended in every direction and crossed and intercrossed so that no man could tell where it ended. But all men could surely tell that these lines of influence ran from all ends of the county into the hand of the attorney for the railroad in Alden and that from his hand they passed on into the hands of the single great man in New York whose money and brain dominated the whole transportation business of the State. All men knew, too, that those lines passed through the Capitol at Albany and that no man there, from the Executive down to the youngest page in the legislative corridors, was entirely immune from their influence.

Now the U. & M. Railroad had been openly charged with having procured the setting of the fire that had left five hundred hill people homeless in Tupper and Adirondack Counties. It would, of course, be impossible to bring the railroad to trial on such a charge in any county of the State. The company had really nothing to fear in the way of criminal prosecution. But the matter had touched the temper and roused the suspicions of the great, headless body called the public. The railroad felt that it must not be silent under even a muttered and vague charge of such nature. It must strike first, and in a spectacular manner. It must divert the public mind by a counter charge.

Before the rain had come down to wet the ashes of the fire, the Grand Jury of Racquette County had been prepared to find an indictment against Jeffrey Whiting for the murder of Samuel Rogers. They had found that Samuel Rogers was an agent of the railroad engaged upon a peaceable and lawful journey through the hills in the interests of his company. He had been found shot through the back of the head and the circumstances surrounding his death were of such a nature and disposition as to warrant the finding of a bill against the young man who for months had been leading a stubborn fight against the railroad.

The case had been advanced over all others on the calendar in Judge Leslie's court, for the railroad was determined to occupy the mind of the public with this case until the people should have had time to forget the sensation of the fire. The mind at the head of the railroad's affairs argued that the mind of the public could hold only one thing at a time. Therefore it was better to put this murder case into that mind and keep it there until some new thing should arise.

The celerity with which Jeffrey Whiting had been brought to trial; the well-oiled smoothness with which the machinery of the Grand Jury had done its work, and the efficient way in which judge and prosecuting attorney had worked together for the selection of what was patently a "railroad" jury, were all evidence that a strong and confident power was moving its forces to an assured and definite end. This judge and this jury would allow no confusion of circumstances to stand in the way of a clear-cut verdict. The fact that the man had been caught in the act of setting fire to the forests, if the Judge allowed it to appear in the record at all, would not stand with the jury as justification, or even extenuation of the deed of murder charged. The fate of the accused must hang solely on the question of fact, whether or not his hand had fired the fatal shot. No other question would be allowed to enter.

And on that question it seemed that the minds of all men were already made up. The prisoner's friends and associates in the hills had been at first loud in their commendation of the act which they had no doubt was his. Now, though they talked less and less, they still did not deny their belief. It was known that they had congratulated him on the very scene of the murder. What room was there in the mind of any one for doubt as to the actual facts of the killing? And since his conviction or acquittal must hinge on that single question, what room was there to hope for his acquittal?

The hill people had come down from their ruined homes, where they had been working night and day to put a roof over their families before the cold should come. They were bitter and sullen and nervous. They had no doubt whatever that Jeffrey Whiting had killed the man, and they had been forced to come down here to tell what they knew--every word of which would count against them. They had come down determined that he should not suffer for his act, which had been done, as it were, in the name of all of them. But the rapid certainty in which the machinery of the law moved on toward its sacrifice unnerved them. There was nothing for them to do, it seemed, but to sit there, idle and glum, waiting for the end.

Jeffrey Whiting sat listening stolidly to the opening arraignment by the District Attorney. He was not surprised by any of it. The chain of circumstances which had begun to wrap itself around him that morning on Bald Mountain had never for a moment relaxed its tightening hold upon him. He had followed his friends that day and all of that night and had reached Lowville early the next day. He had found his mother there safe and his aunt and even Cassius Bascom, but had been horrified to learn that Ruth Lansing had turned back into the face of the fire in an effort to find and bring back the Bishop of Alden. No word had been had of either of them. He had told his mother exactly what had happened in the hills. He had been ready to kill the man. He had wished to do so. But another had fired before he did. He had not, in fact, used his gun at all. She had believed him implicitly, of course. Why should she not? If he had actually shot the man he would have told her that just as exactly and truthfully. But Jeffrey was aware that she was the only person who did or would believe him.

He was just on the point of mounting one of his mother's horses, to go up into the lower hills in the hope of finding Ruth wandering somewhere, when he was placed under arrest for the murder of Rogers. The two men who had escaped down the line of the chain had gotten quickly to a telegraph line and had made their report. The railroad people had taken their decision and had acted on the instant. The warrant was ready and waiting for Jeffrey before he even reached Lowville.

When he had been taken out of his own county and brought before the Grand Jury in Racquette County, he realised that any hope he might have had for a trial on the moral merits of the case was thereby lost. Unless he could find and actually produce that other man, whoever he was, who had fired the shot, his own truthful story was useless. His own friends who had been there at hand would not believe his oath.

His mother and Ruth Lansing sat in court in the front seats just to the right of him. From time to time he turned to smile reassuringly at them with a confidence that he was far from feeling. His mother smiled back through glistening grey eyes, all the while marking with a twinge at her heart the great sharp lines that were cutting deep into the big boyish face of her son. Mostly she was thinking of the morning, just a few months ago when her little boy, suddenly and unaccountably grown to the size of a tall man, had been obliged to lift up her face to kiss her. He was going down into the big world, to conquer it and bring it home for her. With that boyish forgetfulness of everything but his own plans of conquest, which is at once the pride and the heart-stab of every mother with her man child, he had kissed her and told her the old, old lie that we all have told--that he would be back in a little while, that all would be the same again. And she had smiled up into his face and had compounded the lie with him.

Then in that very moment the man Rogers had come. And the mother heart in her was not gentle at the thought of him. He had come like a trail of evil across their lives, embittering the hearts of all of them. Never since she had seen him had she slept a good night. Never had she been able to drop asleep without a hard thought of him. Even now, the thought of him lying in an unhonoured grave among the ashes of the hills could not soften her heart toward him. The gentle, kindly heart of her was very near to hating even the dead as she thought of her boy brought to this pass because of that man.

Ruth Lansing had come twice to the county jail in Danton with his mother to see Jeffrey. They had not been left alone, but she had clung to him and kissed him boldly as though by her right before all men. The first time he had watched her sharply, looking almost savagely to see her shrink away from him in pity and fear of his guilt, as he had seen men who had been his friends shrink away from him. But there had been not a shadow of that in Ruth, and his heart leaped now as he remembered how she had walked unafraid into his arms, looking him squarely and bravely in the eyes and crying to him to forget the foolish words that she had said to him that last day in the hills. In that pulsing moment Jeffrey had looked into her eyes and had seen there not the love of the little girl that he had known but the unbounded love and confidence of the woman who would give herself to him for life or death. He had seen it; the look of all the women of earth who love, whose feet go treading in tenderness and undying pity, whose hands are fashioned for the healing of torn hearts.

It was only when she had gone, and when he in the loneliness of his cell was reliving the hour, that he remembered that she had scarcely listened to his story of the morning in the hills. Of course, she had heard his story from his mother and was probably already so familiar with it that it had lost interest for her. But no, that was not like Ruth. She was always a direct little person, who wanted to know the exact how and why of everything first hand. She would not have been satisfied with anybody's telling of the matter but his own.

Then a horrible suspicion leaped into his mind and struck at his heart. Could it be that she had over-acted it all? Could it be that she had brushed aside his story because she really did not believe it and could not listen to it without betraying her doubt? And had she blinded him with her pity? Had she acted all--!

He threw himself down on his cot and writhed in blind despair. Might not even his mother have deceived him! Might not she too have been acting! What did he care now for name or liberty, or life itself! The girl had mocked him with what he thought was love, when it was only--!

But his good sense brought him back and set him on his feet. Ruth was no actress. And if she had been the greatest actress the world had ever seen she could not have acted that flooding love light into her eyes.

He threw back his head, laughing softly, and began to pace his cell rapidly. There was some other explanation. Either she had deliberately put his story aside in order to keep the whole of their little time together entirely to themselves, or Ruth knew something that made his story unimportant.

She had been through the fire herself. Both she and the Bishop must have gone straight through it from their home in its front line to the rear of it at French Village. How, no one could tell. Jeffrey had heard wild tales of the exploit-- The French people had made many wonders of the coming of these two to them in the hour of their deliverance, the one the Bishop of their souls, the other the young girl just baptised by Holy Church and but little differing from the angels.

Who could tell, thought Jeffrey, what the fire might have revealed to one or both of these two as they went through it. Perhaps there were other men who had not been accounted for. Then he remembered Rafe Gadbeau. He had been with Rogers. He had once waylaid Jeffrey at Rogers' command. Might it not be that the bullet which killed Rogers was intended for Jeffrey himself! He must have been almost in the line of that bullet, for Rogers had been facing him squarely and the bullet had struck Rogers fairly in the back of the head.

Or again, people had said that Rogers had possessed some sort of mysterious hold over Rafe Gadbeau, and that Gadbeau did his bidding unwillingly, under a pressure of fear. What if Gadbeau there under the excitement of the fire, and certain that another man would be charged with the killing, had decided that here was the time and place to rid himself of the man who had made him his slave!

The thing fascinated him, as was natural; and, pacing his cell, stopping between mouthfuls of his food as he sat at the jail table, sitting up in his cot in the middle of the night to think, Jeffrey caught at every scrap of theory and every thread of fact that would fit into the story as it must have happened. He wandered into many blind trails of theory and explanation, but, strange as it was, he at last came upon the truth--and stuck to it.

Gadbeau had killed Rogers. Gadbeau had been caught in the fire and had almost burned to death. He had managed to reach the place where Ruth and the Bishop had found refuge. He had died there in their presence. He had confessed. The Catholics always told the truth when they were going to die. Ruth and the Bishop had heard him. Ruth _knew_. The Bishop _knew_.

When Ruth came again, he watched her closely; and saw--just what he had expected to see. Ruth _knew_. It was not only her love and her confidence in him. She had none of the little whispering, torturing doubts that must sometimes, unbidden, rise to frighten even his mother. Ruth _knew_.

That she should not tell him, or give him any outward hint of what she was hiding in her mind, did not surprise him. It was a very serious matter this with Catholics. It was a sacred matter with anybody, to carry the secret of a dead man. Ruth would not speak unnecessarily of it. When the proper time came, and there was need, she would speak. For the present--Ruth _knew_. That was enough.

When the Bishop came down from Alden to see him, Jeffrey watched him as he had watched Ruth. He had never been very observant. He had never had more than a boy's careless indifference and disregard of details in his way of looking at men and things. But much thinking in the dark had now given him intuitions that were now sharp and sensitive as those of a woman. He was quick to know that the grip of the Bishop's hand on his, the look of the Bishop's eye into his, were not those of a man who had been obliged to fight against doubts in order to keep his faith in him. That grip and that look were not those of a man who wished to believe, who tried to believe, who told himself and was obliged to keep on telling himself that he believed in spite of all. No. Those were the grip and the look of a man who _knew_. The Bishop _knew_.

It was even easier to understand the Bishop's silence than it had been to see why Ruth might not speak of what she knew. The Bishop was an official in a high place, entrusted with a dark secret. He must not speak of such things without a very serious cause. But, of course, there was nothing in this world so sacred as the life of an innocent man. Of course, when the time and the need came, the Bishop would speak.

So Jeffrey had pieced together his fragments of fact and deduction. So he had watched and discovered and reasoned and debated with himself. He had not, of course, said a word of these things to any one. The result was that, while he listened to the plans which his lawyer, young Emmet Dardis, laid for his defence--plans which, in the face of the incontestable facts which would be brought against them, would certainly amount to little or nothing--he really paid little attention to them. For, out of his reasoning and out of the things his heart felt, he had built up around himself an inner citadel, as it were, of defence which no attack could shake. He had come to feel, had made himself feel, that his life and his name were absolutely safe in the keeping of these two people--the one a girl who loved him and who would give her life for him, and the other a true friend, a man of God, a true man. He had nothing to fear. When the time came these two would speak. It was true that he was outwardly depressed by the concise and bitter conviction in the words of the prosecuting attorney. For Lemuel Squires was of the character that makes the most terrible of criminal prosecutors--an honest, narrow man who was always absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused from the moment that a charge had been made. But inwardly he had no fear.

The weight of evidence that would be brought against him, the fact that his own best friends would be obliged to give their oaths against him, the very feeling of being accused and of having to scheme and plan to prove his innocence to a world that--except here and there--cared not a whit whether he was innocent or guilty, all these things bowed his head and brought his eyes down to the floor. But they could not touch that inner wall that he had built around himself. Ruth _knew_; the Bishop _knew_.

The rasping speech of the prosecutor was finished at last.

Old Erskine Beasley was the first witness called.

The prosecuting attorney took him sharply in hand at once for though he had been called as a witness for the prosecution it was well known that he was unwilling to testify at all. So the attorney had made no attempt to school him beforehand, and he was determined now to allow him to give only direct answers to the questions put to him.

Two or three times the old man attempted to explain, at the end of an answer, just why he had gone up into the high hills the night before the twentieth of August--that he had heard that Rogers and a band of men had gone into the woods to start fires. But he was ordered to stop, and these parts of his answers were kept out of the record. Finally he was rebuked savagely by the Judge and ordered to confine himself to answering the lawyer's questions, on pain of being arrested for contempt. It was a high-handed proceeding that showed the temper and the intention of the Judge and a stir of protest ran around the courtroom. But old Erskine Beasley was quelled. He gave only the answers that the prosecutor forced from him.

"Did you hear a shot fired?" he was asked.

"Yes."

"Did you hear two shots fired?"

"No."

"Did you see Jeffrey Whiting's gun?"

"Yes."

"Did you examine it?"

"Yes."

"Had it been fired off?"

"Yes."

"Excused," snapped the prosecutor. And the old man, almost in tears, came down from the stand. He knew that his simple yes and no answers had made the most damaging sort of evidence.

Then the prosecutor went back in the story to establish a motive. He called several witnesses who had been agents of the railroad and associated in one way or another with the murdered man in his efforts to get options on the farm lands in the hills. Even these witnesses, though they were ready to give details and opinions which might have been favorable to his side of the case, he held down strictly to answering with a word his own carefully thought out questions.

With these answers the prosecutor built up a solid continuity of cause and effect from the day when Rogers had first come into the hills to offer Jeffrey Whiting a part in the work with himself right up to the moment when the two had faced each other that morning on Bald Mountain.