Atlantic Narratives Part 36

His spirits lightened somewhat in the process of dressing for his outing. They lightened still more when, on his way to the place of entertainment, he came up with three or four of his mates similarly bound, and went on with them, easily the hero of the little group.

Sutro, though a county seat, was a place of few excitements. The finding of the injured tramp, his death, the inquest, which had been held that day, were topics of surpa.s.sing interest, and Robbins, by virtue of his momentary contact, found his importance measurably enhanced. Before the evening was over, he had told his story a half-dozen times, each time with less repulsion, with a keener sense of its dramatic value.

'I was walking along the cut--you know, there where the train goes under you--and I saw him and yelled at the engineer to stop. I thought he was dead already--he looked like it. I don't know what I yelled for, only I thought he'd roll off. No, I didn't say I saw Whiting up on top,--' He adhered scrupulously to the form of his first telling,--'I saw him on those steps on the side. I'd called to him, too, if I'd seen him in time, but I didn't.'

'I bet he'd have understood,' suggested one of the listeners.

There was something cynical, something appalling, in the fas.h.i.+on in which their untempered youth seized upon the idea of guilt as the concomitant of injury. Robbins, tramping home a half-hour after midnight, felt all round him the concurrence of his mates--a warm supporting wave. He was committed beyond retreat now to his theory.

Almost he was self-deceived. Visualizing the scene, he could scarcely have said whether, actually, he saw Whiting's big body flattened against the side of the car, or whether he himself had superimposed the detail.

He slept late next morning, and emerging, discovered his mother, red-eyed, moving restlessly between kitchen and dining-room. She called to him as he came out, but it was not until he was seated before his oven-dried breakfast that, with a long breath, as though she braced herself,--

'Mrs. Cartwright was here this morning,' she observed.

The words were indifferent, but the tone was so full of significance that instinctively the boy stopped eating to listen.

'She'd been sitting up last night with Mrs. Morgan. Robbins, that boy--that poor boy--wasn't a tramp at all. He was Charlie Morgan, trying to beat his way back home.'

'How'd they know?' Robbins asked.

'Something about the body. There was some mark. It's dreadful for his mother. And it's worse because she thinks--Mrs. Cartwright says a good many people think--it wasn't an accident at all. The wound don't look like it. And then your seeing Mr. Whiting--'

'What'd you tell her that for?' Robbins muttered.

He pushed back his chair, his hunger vanished as if from feasting.

'I didn't. She told me. She says that man who has the truck-garden--Emerson, isn't it?--is saying he saw Mr. Whiting on the car-roof and recognized him. But, of course, a man like that--'

Her tone disposed effectually of the second witness. She got to her feet and began to gather up the dishes from the table.

'Mrs. Cartwright says Mr. Cartwright's looking into the thing. In his position, he'd have to. I told her you'd go up to his office.' She was pa.s.sing behind Robbins's chair as she spoke. To his amazement, she stooped and laid her cheek for an instant against his shoulder. 'Don't you let him worry you, Robbie. You just stick to your story,' she counseled.

'I'm not going near him,' Robbins declared defiantly.

More than the hush of appreciation at his first statement, more than the news of Whiting's anger, his mother's unexpected caress impressed upon him the seriousness of his position.

When he left the house, breakfast ended, he was fixed in his determination neither to get within reach of Cartwright, who was county attorney, nor to repeat his story. But once upon the street he found to his consternation that the story no longer needed his repet.i.tion. It traveled on every tongue, growing as it went. Nor was there lacking other evidence to support it. The examining physician shook his head over the shape and nature of the fatal wound; the helpers who had carried the man were swift to recollect his dying words. From somewhere there sprang the rumor of long-standing feud between Whiting and Charlie Morgan. Then it was no more a rumor but an established fact--time, place, and enhancing circ.u.mstances all known and repeated.

'Enough to hang anybody,' Grotend summed up the evidence, following with his coterie the trend of gossip. 'Only thing is, it's funny the sort of people that do all the hearing and seeing.' He put his arm round Robbins's shoulders. 'There's Nelse here and Doc. Simpson--they're all right; but look at the rest of 'em--If they said it was a nice day, I'd know it was raining. Take that Emerson fellow--'

'Well, if Nelse saw him on the side, I don't see why Emerson couldn't see him up on top; he must 'a' been there,' a listener protested. And Robbins, his throat constricted, drew out of hearing.

For the most part, however, he found a lively satisfaction in the increase of rumor. In such a ma.s.s of testimony, he reasoned, his own bit of spurious evidence was wholly unimportant. When that day and a second and still a third had pa.s.sed with no demand upon him, his oppression vanished. Even the news of Whiting's arrest did not greatly disturb him.

There was now and then a minute of sick discomfort,--once when the truck-gardener attempted to hob-n.o.b with him on the strength of their common information; once and more acutely when an overheard conversation warned him that the accused man was depending on an alibi,--but for the most part he put the danger of discovery resolutely out of his mind.

Even should the alibi be forthcoming and his own story go thereby to the ground, 'They can't be sure about it,' he comforted himself. 'They can't know I didn't--' Even in his thought he left the phrase unfinished.

It was the fourth day after Whiting's arrest that, going toward home in the early evening, he heard his name spoken from behind, and turning, saw the county attorney. His first barely inhibited impulse was toward flight, but it was already too late for that. The elder man's greeting detained him as by a hand upon his arm. He halted reluctantly, and they went on side by side.

The county attorney was a man in his early sixties--a tall stooping figure, gray-haired, with an habitual courtesy of manner which, more than irascibility, intimidated his younger neighbors. It was a part of his courtesy, now, to begin far-off from the subject at hand, in an effort, foredoomed to failure, to put his auditor at ease.

'I often watch you tall boys going past, and remind myself that I am getting old. I can remember most of you in your carriages. Indeed, with you, your father and I were law students together. And now you're in high school, your mother tells me.' And with hardly a s.h.i.+ft of tone, 'She tells me, too,--or rather my wife does,--that you were unfortunate enough to see Mr. Whiting on the day of poor Morgan's death. I am sorry--'

'I--didn't see him do anything,' Robbins protested. His tongue was suddenly thick and furry, and the words came with difficulty. 'Nothing I could swear to. He was just--there.'

He was staring straight ahead; he could not see how shrewd were the kindly eyes which measured him.

'Timid,' the lawyer was labeling his witness. 'Sensitive.

Over-scrupulous. He'd scruple his testimony out of existence.'

Aloud he spoke with grave rea.s.surance. 'Your merely seeing Mr. Whiting can do him no harm. Indeed, you may not be needed at all. The preliminary examination having been waived--' He paused for a moment before the Nelson gate, his thin-featured old face remote and serious.

'In any case, remember this, my boy. Nothing is ever required of you on the witness stand except to tell your story exactly as you have told it off the stand. In the end the truth will come out and no innocent man be harmed.'

He congratulated himself as he went on up the street that he had rea.s.sured the lad, put before him his irresponsibility in its true light. Had he looked back, he might have seen the rea.s.sured witness staring after him in a kind of horror of amazement. To Robbins it was as if, astoundingly, an outsider had voiced the thought of his own heart.

That truth must prevail, that false witnesses would be brought to confusion--it was a belief ingrained into the fibre of his being. He was sick with a premonition of disgrace.

'Only, they can't _know_,' he tried to hearten himself. 'I can stick to it I did.' He stood still a moment, the line of his sensitive chin grown suddenly hard. 'And I've got to stick to it,' he warned himself. 'I've got to stick it out as long as I live.'

It did not need the county attorney's advice to keep him away from the court-room during the opening days of the trial. With all the youthful masculinity of Sutro crowding the courthouse steps, Robbins sat at home in the hot, darkened parlor, reading from books pulled down at random, seeing always, no matter what he read, a room set thick with eyes--eyes scornful, eyes reproachful, eyes speculative.

When at last the ordeal came, it was so much less dreadful than his antic.i.p.ation of it that he was conscious of an immediate relief. There was, indeed, a minute of blind confusion as he made his way toward the stand--voices singing in his ears, a blue mist before his eyes. Then, somehow, he was sworn and seated, and all round him were the friendly faces of neighbors. He could see the judge nod encouragement to him over his desk; he could see the bracing kindness of the county attorney's glance. Whiting he could not see, the bowed shoulders of a reporter intervening.

He was scarcely nervous after the first moments. His story flowed from him without effort, almost without volition. 'I was walking along the track--I'd been fis.h.i.+ng--' It seemed to him that he had said the words a million times.

There were interruptions now and then; objections; questions from a round-faced, deep-voiced youngster, who, Robbins divined presently, was Whiting's lawyer; but all of it--the narrative, the pauses, the replies--came with the regular, effortless movement of well-oiled machinery. He could have laughed at the puerile efforts of the defense to break down his story.--'Was he sure that he knew James Whiting?' Was there a resident of Sutro who did not know him? 'Could he swear,--taking thought that he was under oath,--could he _swear_ that the man on the side of the car was James Whiting and not some other man resembling him?

If, on a moving train, another man resembling James Whiting, of about James Whiting's size--'

'He knows he can't touch me,' Robbins was thinking triumphantly. 'He knows it!'

The question of truth or falsehood was quite removed from him now. He came down from the stand finely elated, and in the afternoon went back of his own accord to the court-room. Emerson, the truck-gardener, was under examination and faring badly. One by one, the damaging facts of his past came out against him--an arrest for theft, a jail sentence for vagrancy, a quarrel with the prisoner, proved threats. The victim emerged limp from the ordeal, and slunk away from the room, wholly discredited.

'Serves him right, though,' Robbins quenched his momentary pity. 'I knew all the time he was lying.' He started suddenly, so violently that the listener seated next him turned in irritation. 'And,' it had flashed through his mind, 'and he knew I was!'

His eyes sought the prisoner--the man who also knew--where he sat hunched heavily forward in his chair, his arms upon the table. For an instant, pity, like some racking physical pain, shot through Robbins. To be caught in such a web! To be caught through no fault of his own! It was the first time the purely personal side had broken its way past his own selfish concern. It stifled him and, forcing his eyes from the man's brooding face, he got up and stumbled out of the room.

But he could not stay out. An indefinite dread dragged him back presently. An indefinite dread held him bound to his place during the examination of the witnesses who followed, during the days of argument, and the judge's inconclusive charge. He lay awake on the night following the jury's retirement, picturing over and over in his own mind the scene of their return--just what degree of astonishment his face should show in listening to their verdict, with just what proud reticence and conscious wrong he should make his way out from the crowd. He had never said that Whiting was guilty--he reminded himself of that. All he had ever said was that on one certain day, in one certain place-- He rolled over on his face and, hands across his eyes, tried vainly to sleep.

Half of Sutro was loafing about the court-house lawn next morning, pus.h.i.+ng its way into the corridors at every rumor, drifting back to the freer outer air. When at last the rumor proved a true one, Robbins found himself far in the back of the room, the wall behind him, on three sides a packed, jostling crowd. There was a blur of unintentional noise in the place--heavy breathing, the creaking of a door. Through the noise pierced at intervals the accustomed voice of the judge, and set between the intervals the mumble of the foreman's reply.

'--Agreed, all of you?'

'Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?'

The mumble dropped lower still. A stir swept over the front of the room, a wave of voiceless interest pa.s.sing from front to back.

'What--what--' Robbins stammered, straining higher on tiptoe.

'Guilty. Manslaughter,' said the man beside him. He brought his hand down heavily on the boy's shoulder. 'Suits you all right. Everybody knew--'

The gavel sounded and he broke off, bending forward to listen.