The Bondboy Part 45

Unawed by the sheriff's warning, the a.s.sembly laughed again. The sound ran over the room like a scudding cloud across a meadow, and when the sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. n.o.body can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. n.o.body can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze a.s.sails a field of grain.

The sheriff, not being deeper than another man, saw the fatuity of his labor. He turned to the court with a clownish gesture of the hands, expressive of his utter inability to stop this thing.

"Proceed with the case," said the judge, understanding the situation better than the sheriff knew.

The prosecuting attorney labored away with Ollie, full of the feeling that something masked lay behind her pale reticence, some guilty conspiracy between her and the bound boy, which would show the lacking motive for the crime. He asked her again about Morgan, how long she had known him, where he came from, and where he went--a question to which Ollie would have been glad enough to have had the answer herself.

He hung on to the subject of Morgan so persistently that Joe began to feel his throat drying out with a closing sensation which he could not swallow. He trembled for Ollie, fearing that she would be forced into telling it all. That was not a woman's story, thought he, with a heart full of resentment for the prosecutor. Let him wait till Morgan came, and then----

But what grounds had he now for believing Morgan might come? Unless he came within the next hour, his coming might be too late.

"You were in bed and asleep when the shot that killed your husband was fired, you have told the jury, Mrs. Chase?" questioned the prosecutor, dropping Morgan at last.

"Yes, sir."

"Then how did it come that when Mrs. Greening and her daughter-in-law arrived a few minutes later you were all dressed up in a white dress?"

"I just slipped it on," said she.

"You just slipped it on," repeated the prosecutor, turning his eyes to the jury, and not even facing Mrs. Chase as he spoke, but reading into her words discredit, suspicion, and a guilty knowledge.

"It was the only one I had besides two old wrappers. It was the one I was married in, and the only one I could put on to look decent in before people," said she.

A crowd is the most volatile thing in the world. It can laugh and sigh and groan and weep, as well as shout and storm, with the ease of an infant, and then immediately regain its immobility and fixed attention.

With Ollie's simple statement a sound rose from it which was a denunciation and a curse upon the ashes of old Isom Chase. It was as if a sympathetic old lady had shaken her head and groaned:

"Oh, shame on you--shame!"

Hammer gave the jury a wide-sweeping look of satisfaction, and made a note on the tumbled pile of paper which lay in front of him.

The prosecutor was a man with congressional aspirations, and he did not care to prejudice his popularity by going too far in baiting a woman, especially one who had public sympathy in the measure that it was plainly extended to Ollie. He eased up, descending from his heights of severity, and began to address her respectfully in a manner that was little short of apology for what his stern duty compelled him to do.

"Now I will ask you, Mrs. Chase, whether your husband and this defendant, Joe Newbolt, ever had words in your hearing?"

"Once," Ollie replied.

"Do you recall the day?"

"It was the morning after Joe came to our house to work," said she.

"Do you remember what the trouble was about and what said?"

"Well, they said a good deal," Ollie answered. "They fussed because Joe didn't get up when Isom called him."

Joe felt his heart contract. It seemed to him that Ollie need not have gone into that; it looked as if she was bent not alone on protecting herself, but on fastening the crime on him. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness. Sweat came out on his forehead; his palms grew moist. He had looked for Ollie to stand by him at least, and now she seemed running away, eager to tell something that would sound to his discredit.

"You may tell the jury what happened that morning, Mrs. Chase."

Hammer's objection fell on barren ground, and Ollie told the story under the directions of the judge.

"You say there was a sound of scuffling after Isom called him?" asked the prosecutor.

"Yes, it sounded like Isom shook him and Joe jumped out of bed."

"And what did Joe Newbolt say?"

"He said, 'Put that down! I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit me, I'll kill you in your tracks!'"

"That's what you heard Joe Newbolt say to your husband up there in the loft over your head?"

The prosecutor was eager. He leaned forward, both hands on the table, and looked at her almost hungrily. The jurymen shuffled their feet and sat up in their chairs with renewed interest. A hush fell over the room.

Here was the motive at the prosecutor's hand.

"That's what he said," Ollie affirmed, her gaze bent downward.

She told how Isom had come down after that, followed by Joe. And the prosecutor asked her to repeat what she had heard Joe say once more for the benefit of the jury. He spoke with the air of a man who already has the game in the bag.

When the prosecutor was through with his profitable cross-examination, Hammer tried to lessen the effect of Ollie's damaging disclosure, but failed. He was a depressed and crestfallen man when he gave it up.

Ollie stepped down from the place of inquisition with the color of life coming again into her drained lips and cheeks, the breath freer in her throat. Her secret had not been torn from her fearful heart; she had deepened the cloud that hung over Joe Newbolt's head. "Let him blab now," said she in her inner satisfaction. A man might say anything against a woman to save his neck; she was wise enough and deep enough, for all her shallowness, to know that people were quick to understand a thing like that.

In pa.s.sing back to her place beside her mother she had not looked at Joe. So she did not see the perplexity, anxiety, even reproach, which had grown in Joe's eyes when she testified against him.

"She had no need to do that," thought Joe, sitting there in the glow of the prosecutor's triumphant face. He had trusted Ollie to remain his friend, and, although she had told nothing but the truth concerning his rash threat against Isom, it seemed to him that she had done so with a studied intent of working him harm.

His resentment rose against Ollie, urging him to betray her guilty relations with Morgan and strip her of the protecting mantle which he had wrapped about her at the first. He wondered whether Morgan had not come and entered into a conspiracy with her to s.h.i.+eld themselves. In such case what would his unfolding of the whole truth amount to, discredited as he already was in the minds of the jurors by that foolish threat which he had uttered against Isom in the thin dawn of that distant day?

Perhaps Alice had gone away, also, after hearing Ollie's testimony, in the belief that he was altogether unworthy, and already branded with the responsibility for that old man's death. He longed to look behind him and search the throng for her, but he dared not.

Joe bowed his head, as one overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and shame, yet never doubting that he had acted for the best when he a.s.sumed the risk on that sad night to s.h.i.+eld his master's wife. It was a thing that a man must do, that a man would do again.

He did not know that Alice Price, doubting not him, but the woman who had just left the witness-stand and resumed her place among the people, was that moment searching out the shallow soul of Ollie Chase with her accusing eyes. She sat only a little way from Ollie, in the same row of benches, beside the colonel. She turned a little in her place so she could see the young widow's face when she came down from the stand with that new light in her eyes. Now she whispered to her father, and looked again, bending forward a little in a way that seemed impertinent, considering that it was Alice Price.

Ollie was disconcerted by this attention, which drew other curious eyes upon her. She moved uneasily, making a bustle of arranging herself and her belongings in the seat, her heart troubled with the shadow of some vague fear.

Why did Alice Price look at her so accusingly? Why did she turn to her father and nod and whisper that way? What did she know? What could she know? What was Joe Newbolt and his obscure life to Colonel Price's fine daughter, sitting there dressed better than any other woman in the room?

Or what was Isom Chase, his life, his death, or his widow, to her?

Yet she had some interest beyond a pa.s.sing curiosity, for Ollie could feel the concentration of these sober brown eyes upon her, even when she turned to avoid them. She recalled the interest that Colonel Price and his daughter had taken in Joe. People had talked of it at first. They couldn't understand it any more than she could. The colonel and his daughter had visited Joe in jail, and carried books to him, and treated him as one upon their own level.

What had Joe told them? Had the coward betrayed her?

Ollie was a.s.sailed again by all her old, dread fears. What if they should get up and denounce her? With all of Colonel Price's political and social influence, would not the public, and the judge and jury, believe Joe's story if he should say it was true? She believed now that it was all arranged for Joe to denounce her, and that timid invasion of color was stemmed in her cheeks again.

It was a lowering day, with a threat of unseasonable darkness in the waning afternoon. The judge looked at his watch; Captain Taylor stirred himself and pushed the shutters back from the two windows farthest from the bench, and let in more light.

People did not know just what was coming next, but the atmosphere of the room was charged with a foreboding of something big. No man would risk missing it by leaving, although rain was threatening, and long drives over dark roads lay ahead of many of the anxious listeners.