The Bondboy

  CHAPTER XV

  THE STATE _VS._ NEWBOLT

  The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with longwindows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay allaround the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill,upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, inthe center of which the court-house stood, and close around thebuilding.

  In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of thesespreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a gianttree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place.It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fineold days before the war.

  There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one ofthe logs of the original court-house, built in that square more thansixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for themurder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summerdays, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirringincidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut inthe tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recallmemories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.

  Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been atthe beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge satbehind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick withmany layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now,scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairwayleading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turnhalf-way to the top.

  The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels ofreluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be pronounced uponthem, had kicked it in protest as they passed. It was as solemn andgloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had goneup it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treadswere worn to splinters; its balustrade was hacked by the knives ofgenerations of loiterers. There was no window in the wall giving uponit; darkness hung over its first landing on the brightest day. The justand the unjust alike were shrouded in its gloomy penumbra as theypassed. It was the solemn warder at the gate, which seemed to cast ataint over all who came, and fasten a cloud upon them which they muststand in the white light of justice to purge away.

  When the civil war began, the flag of the Union was taken down from thecupola of the court-house. In all the years that had passed since itsclose, the flag never had been hoisted to its place of honor again. Thatevent was not to take place, indeed, until twenty years or more afterthe death of Isom Chase, when the third court-house was built, and theold generation had passed away mainly, and those who remained of it hadforgotten. But that incident is an incursion into matters which do notconcern this tale.

  Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcelyastir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons offarmers and the straggling troops of horsemen from far-lying districtsbegan to come in and seek hitching-room around the court-house square.It looked very early in the day as if there was going to be an unusualcrowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.

  Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spreadwider than the sound of the best deeds of the worthiest man in thecounty. It was not so much on account of the notoriety of the old man,which had not died with him, as the mystery in the manner of his death,that people were anxious to attend the trial.

  It was not known whether Joe Newbolt was to take the witness-stand inhis own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; underthe law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of histestimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor's hand. Joe wouldbe confronted with that, and, if there was a spark of spunk in him,people said, he would rise up and stand by it. And then, once Sam Lucasgot him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions andconcealments.

  Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state hadsummoned forty witnesses; Hammer's list was half as long. It was aquestion in the public speculation what either side expected to prove ordisprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to provevery little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the juryas possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he coulddrag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlersin the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record fromthe date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose ofsustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to drawof his client's well-known honesty and clean past.

  Fully an hour before Judge Maxwell arrived to open court, the benchesdown toward the front were full. This vantage ground had beenpreempted mainly by the old men whose hearing was growing dim. Theysat there with their old hands, as brown as blackberry roots, claspedover their sticks and umbrellas, their peaked old chins up, their eyesalert. Here and there among them sat an ancient dame, shawled andkerchiefed, for the day was chill; and from them all there rose thescent of dry tobacco-leaves, and out of their midst there soundedthe rustling of paper-bags and the cracking of peanut-shells.

  "Gosh m' granny!" said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stooda moment after placing a pitcher of water and a glass on the bench,ready for Judge Maxwell's hand. "They're here from Necessity toTribulation!"

  Of course the captain was stretching the territory represented by thatgathering somewhat, for those two historic post offices lay farther awayfrom Shelbyville than the average inhabitant of that country everjourneyed in his life. But there was no denying that they had come fromsurprising distances.

  There was Uncle Posen Spratt, from Little Sugar Creek, with hissteer's-horn ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife,July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a roadthat pitched from end to end when it didn't slant from side to side, andtook a shag-barked, sharp-shinned, cross-eyed wind-splitter to travel.There sat old Bev Munday, from Blue Cut, who hadn't been that far awayfrom home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on hishead; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he'd keepit there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, fromSni-a-bar Township was over there in the corner where he could slant upand spit out of the window, and there was California Colboth, as bigaround the waist as a cow, right behind him. She had came over in herdish-wheeled buggy from Green Valley, and she was staying with hermarried son, who worked on the railroad and lived in that littlepink-and-blue house behind the water-tank.

  Oh, you could stand there--said Captain Taylor--and name all the oldsettlers for twenty-seven mile in a ring! But the captain hadn't thetime, even if he was taken with the inclination, for the townspeoplebegan to come, and it was his duty to stand at the door and shut off thestream when all the benches were full.

  That was Judge Maxwell's order; nobody was to be allowed to stand aroundthe walls or in the aisles and jig and shuffle and kick up a disturbancejust when the lawyers or witnesses might be saying something that thecaptain would be very anxious to hear. The captain indorsed the judge'smandate, and sustained his judgment with internal warmth.

  General Bryant and Colonel Moss Punton came early, and sat opposite eachother in the middle of the aisle, each on the end of a bench, where theycould look across and exchange opinions, yet escape being crowded by themongrel stock which was sure to come pouring in soon. A good manyunnoted sons of distinguished fathers arrived in pairs and troops, withperfumery on their neckties and chewing-gum in their teeth; and theirsisters, for the greater part as lovely as they were knotty, warty,pimply, and weak-shanked, came after them in churchlike decorum andsettled down on the benches like so many light-winged birds. But notwithout a great many questioning glances and shy explorations aroundthem, not certain that this thing was proper and admissible, it beingsuch a mixed and dry-tobacco atmosphere. Seeing mothers here,grandfathers there, uncles and aunts, cousins and neighbors everywhere,they settled down, assured
, to enjoy the day.

  It was a delightfully horrid thing to be tried for murder, they said,even though one was obscure and nobody, a bound servant in the fields ofthe man whom he had slain. Especially if one came off clear.

  Then Hammer arrived with three law-books under his arm. He was all sleekand shining, perfumed to the last possible drop. His alpaca coat hadbeen replaced by a longer one of broadcloth, his black necktie surelywas as dignified and somberly learned of droop as Judge Burns', or JudgeLittle's, or Attorney Pickell's, who got Perry Norris off for stealingold man Purvis' cow.

  Mrs. Newbolt was there already, awaiting him at the railing whichdivided the lawyers from the lawed, lawing, and, in some cases,outlawed. She was so unobtrusive in her rusty black dress, which lookedas if it were made of storm-streaked umbrellas, that nobody had noticedher.

  Now, when they saw her stand and shake hands with Hammer, and saw Hammerobsequiously but conspicuously conduct her to a chair within the sacredprecincts of the bar, there were whisperings and straightenings ofbacks, and a stirring of feet with that concrete action which belongspeculiarly to a waiting, expectant crowd, but is impossible to segregateor individually define.

  Judge Maxwell opened the door of his chamber, which had stood tall anddark and solemnly closed all morning just a little way behind the bench,and took his place. At the same moment the sheriff, doubtless timinghimself to the smooth-working order, came in from the witness-room,opening from the court-room at the judge's right hand, with theprisoner.

  Joe hesitated a little as the sheriff closed the door behind them, hishand on the prisoner's shoulder, as if uncertain of what was nextrequired of him. The sheriff pushed him forward with commanding gesturetoward the table at which Hammer stood, and Joe proceeded to cross theroom in the fire of a thousand eyes.

  It seemed to him that the sheriff might have made the entrance lessspectacular, that he could have brought him sooner, or another way. Thatwas like leading him across a stage, with the audience all in place,waiting the event. But Joe strode along ahead of the sheriff with hishead up, his long, shaggy hair smoothed into some semblance of order,his spare garments short and outgrown upon his bony frame. His arms wereignominiously bound in the sheriff's handcuffs, linked together by halfa foot of dangling chain.

  That stirring sigh of mingled whispers and deep-drawn breaths ran overthe room again; here and there someone half rose for a better look. Thedim-eyed old men leaned forward to see what was coming next; Uncle PosenSpratt put up his steer's-horn trumpet as if to blow the blast ofjudgment out of his ear.

  Joe sat in the chair which Hammer indicated; the sheriff released onehand from the manacles and locked the other to the arm of the chair.Then Captain Taylor closed the door, himself on the outside of it, andwalked down to the front steps of the court-house with slow and statelytread. There he lifted his right hand, as if to command the attention ofthe world, and pronounced in loud voice this formula:

  "Oy's, oy's, oy's! The hon'r'bl' circuit court of the _hum_teenthjudicial de-strict is now in session, pursu'nt t' 'j'urnm'nt!"

  Captain Taylor turned about as the last word went echoing against theFirst National Bank, and walked slowly up the stairs. He opened thecourt-room door and closed it; he placed his back against it, and foldedhis arms upon his breast, his eyes fixed upon a stain on the wall.

  Judge Maxwell took up some papers from the desk, and spread one of thembefore him.

  "In the matter of Case No. 79, State _vs._ Newbolt. Gentlemen, are youready for trial?"

  The judge spoke in low and confidential voice, meant for the attorneysat the bar only. It scarcely carried to the back of the room, filledwith the sound-killing vapors from five hundred mouths, and many of theold men in the front seats failed to catch it, even though they cuppedtheir hands behind their ears.

  Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose.

  Slight and pale, with a thin chest and a stoop forward, he wasdistinguished by the sharp eyes beside his flat-bridged nose, soflattened out, it seemed, by some old blow, that they could almostcommunicate with each other across it. His light, loose hair was verylong; when he warmed up in speaking he shook it until it tumbled abouthis eyes. Then it was his habit to sweep it back with the palm of hishand in a long, swinging movement of the arm. It was a most expressivegesture; it seemed as if by it he rowed himself back into the placidwaters of reasoning. Now, as he stood before Judge Maxwell, he swept hispalm over his forelock, although it lay snug and unruffled in itsplace.

  "Your honor, the state is ready," said he, and remained standing.

  Hammer pushed his books along the table, shuffled his papers, androse ponderously. He thrust his right hand into the bosom of his coatand leaned slightly against the left in an attitude of scholarlypreparedness.

  "Your honor, the defense is ready," he announced.