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

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

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

Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now, scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway 242 leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn half-way to the top.

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

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

Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcely astir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons of farmers and the straggling troops of horsemen from far-lying districts began 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 unusual crowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.

Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spread wider than the sound of the best deeds of 243 the worthiest man in the county. 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 in his own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; under the law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of his testimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor’s hand. Joe would be 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 Lucas got him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions and concealments.

Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state had summoned forty witnesses; Hammer’s list was half as long. It was a question in the public speculation what either side expected to prove or disprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to prove very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw of his client’s well-known honesty and clean past.

Fully an hour before Judge Maxwell arrived to open court, the benches down toward the front were full. This vantage ground had been preempted mainly by the old men whose hearing was growing dim. They sat there with their old hands, as brown as blackberry roots, clasped over their sticks and umbrellas, their peaked old chins up, their eyes alert. Here and there among them sat an ancient dame, shawled and kerchiefed, for the day was chill; and from them 244 all there rose the scent of dry tobacco-leaves, and out of their midst there sounded the rustling of paper-bags and the cracking of peanut-shells.

“Gosh m’ granny!” said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stood a moment after placing a pitcher of water and a glass on the bench, ready for Judge Maxwell’s hand. “They’re here from Necessity to Tribulation!”

Of course the captain was stretching the territory represented by that gathering somewhat, for those two historic post offices lay farther away from Shelbyville than the average inhabitant of that country ever journeyed in his life. But there was no denying that they had come from surprising distances.

There was Uncle Posen Spratt, from Little Sugar Creek, with his steer’s-horn ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife, July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a road that pitched from end to end when it didn’t slant from side to side, and took 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 away from home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on his head; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he’d keep it there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, from Sni-a-bar Township was over there in the corner where he could slant up and spit out of the window, and there was California Colboth, as big around the waist as a cow, right behind him. She had came over in her dish-wheeled buggy from Green Valley, and she was staying with her married son, who worked on the railroad and lived in that little pink-and-blue house behind the water-tank.

Oh, you could stand there–said Captain Taylor–and name all the old settlers for twenty-seven mile in a ring! But the captain hadn’t the time, even if he was taken with the 245 inclination, for the townspeople began to come, and it was his duty to stand at the door and shut off the stream when all the benches were full.

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

General Bryant and Colonel Moss Punton came early, and sat opposite each other in the middle of the aisle, each on the end of a bench, where they could look across and exchange opinions, yet escape being crowded by the mongrel stock which was sure to come pouring in soon. A good many unnoted sons of distinguished fathers arrived in pairs and troops, with perfumery on their neckties and chewing-gum in their teeth; and their sisters, for the greater part as lovely as they were knotty, warty, pimply, and weak-shanked, came after them in churchlike decorum and settled down on the benches like so many light-winged birds. But not without a great many questioning glances and shy explorations around them, not certain that this thing was proper and admissible, it being such 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 of the man whom he had slain. Especially if one came off clear.

Then Hammer arrived with three law-books under his arm. He was all sleek and shining, perfumed to the last possible drop. His alpaca coat had been replaced by a longer one of broadcloth, his black necktie surely was as dignified and 246 somberly learned of droop as Judge Burns’, or Judge Little’s, or Attorney Pickell’s, who got Perry Norris off for stealing old man Purvis’ cow.

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

Now, when they saw her stand and shake hands with Hammer, and saw Hammer obsequiously but conspicuously conduct her to a chair within the sacred precincts of the bar, there were whisperings and straightenings of backs, and a stirring of feet with that concrete action which belongs peculiarly to a waiting, expectant crowd, but is impossible to segregate or individually define.

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

Joe hesitated a little as the sheriff closed the door behind them, his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder, as if uncertain of what was next required of him. The sheriff pushed him forward with commanding gesture toward the table at which Hammer stood, and Joe proceeded to cross the room in the fire of a thousand eyes.

It seemed to him that the sheriff might have made the entrance less spectacular, that he could have brought him sooner, or another way. That was like leading him across a stage, with the audience all in place, waiting the event. But Joe strode along ahead of the sheriff with his head up, his long, shaggy hair smoothed into some semblance of order, 247 his spare garments short and outgrown upon his bony frame. His arms were ignominiously bound in the sheriff’s handcuffs, linked together by half a foot of dangling chain.

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

Joe sat in the chair which Hammer indicated; the sheriff released one hand 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, and walked down to the front steps of the court-house with slow and stately tread. There he lifted his right hand, as if to command the attention of the world, and pronounced in loud voice this formula:

“Oy’s, oy’s, oy’s! The hon’r’bl’ circuit court of the humteenth judicial de-strict is now in session, pursu’nt t’ ’j’urnm’nt!”

Captain Taylor turned about as the last word went echoing against the First National Bank, and walked slowly up the stairs. He opened the court-room door and closed it; he placed his back against it, and folded his 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 them before him.

“In the matter of Case No. 79, State vs. Newbolt. Gentlemen, are you ready for trial?”

The judge spoke in low and confidential voice, meant for the attorneys at the bar only. It scarcely carried to the back of the room, filled with the sound-killing vapors from five hundred mouths, and many of the old men in the front seats failed to catch it, even though they cupped their hands behind their ears. 248

Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose.

Slight and pale, with a thin chest and a stoop forward, he was distinguished by the sharp eyes beside his flat-bridged nose, so flattened out, it seemed, by some old blow, that they could almost communicate with each other across it. His light, loose hair was very long; when he warmed up in speaking he shook it until it tumbled about his eyes. Then it was his habit to sweep it back with the palm of his hand in a long, swinging movement of the arm. It was a most expressive gesture; it seemed as if by it he rowed himself back into the placid waters of reasoning. Now, as he stood before Judge Maxwell, he swept his palm over his forelock, although it lay snug and unruffled in its place.

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

Hammer pushed his books along the table, shuffled his papers, and rose ponderously. He thrust his right hand into the bosom of his coat and leaned slightly against the left in an attitude of scholarly preparedness.

“Your honor, the defense is ready,” he announced.