Progress was swifter the next day. The prosecuting attorney, apparently believing that he had made his case, dismissed many of his remaining witnesses who had nothing to testify to in fact. When he announced that the state rested, there was a murmur and rustling in the room, and audibly expressed wonderment over what the public thought to be a grave blunder on Sam Lucas’s part.
The state had not called the widow of Isom Chase to the stand to give testimony against the man accused of her husband’s murder. The public could not make it out. What did it mean? Did the prosecutor hold her more of an enemy than a friend to his efforts to convict the man whose hand had made her a widow? Whispers went around, grave faces were drawn, wise heads wagged. Public charity for Ollie began to falter.
“Him and that woman,” men said, nodding toward Joe, sitting pale and inscrutable beside his blustering lawyer.
The feeling of impending sensation became more acute when it circulated through the room, starting from Captain Taylor at the inner door, that Ollie had been summoned as a witness for the defense; Captain Taylor had served the subpoena himself.
“Well, in that case, Sam Lucas knew what he was doing,” people allowed. “Just wait!” It was as good as a spirituous stimulant to their lagging interest. “Just you wait till Sam Lucas gets hold of her,” they said.
Hammer began the defense by calling his character witnesses
There was no question in the character which Joe’s neighbors gave him. They spoke warmly of his past record among them, of his fidelity to his word and obligation, and of the family record, which Hammer went into with free and unhampered hand.
The prosecutor passed these witnesses with serene confidence. He probably believed that his case was already made, people said, or else he was reserving his fire for Isom’s widow, who, it seemed to everybody, had turned against nature and her own interests in allying herself with the accused.
The morning was consumed in the examination of these character witnesses, Hammer finishing with the last of them just before the midday adjournment. The sheriff was preparing to remove the prisoner. Joe’s hand had been released from the arm of the chair, and the officer had fastened the iron around his wrist. The proceeding always struck Joe with an overwhelming wave of degradation and now he stood with bowed head and averted face.
“Come on,” said the sheriff, goggling down at him with froggish eyes from his vantage on the dais where the witness-chair stood, his long neck on a slant like a giraffe’s. The sheriff took great pleasure in the proceeding of attaching the irons. It was his one central moment in the eyes of the throng.
Joe looked up to march ahead of the sheriff out of the room, and his eyes met the eyes of Alice. She was not far away, and the cheer of their quick message was like a spoken word. She was wearing the same gray dress that she had worn on that day of days, with the one bright feather in her bonnet, and she smiled, nodding to him. And then the swirl of bobbing heads and moving bodies came between them and she was lost.
He looked for her again as the sheriff pushed him along toward the door, but the room was in such confusion that he could not single her out. The judge had gone out through his tall, dark door, and the court-room was no longer an awesome place to those who had gathered for the trial. Men put their hats on their heads and lit their pipes, and bit into their twists and plugs of tobacco and emptied their mouths of the juices as they went slowly toward the door.
Mrs. Greening was the first witness called by Hammer after the noon recess. Hammer quickly discovered his purpose in calling her as being nothing less than that of proving by her own mouth that her husband, Sol, was a gross and irresponsible liar.
Hammer went over the whole story of the tragedy–Mrs. Greening having previously testified to all these facts as a witness for the state–from the moment that Sol had called her out of bed and taken her to the Chase home to support the young widow in her hour of distraction and fear. By slow and lumbering ways he led her, like a blind horse floundering along a heavy road, through the front door, up the stairs into Ollie’s room, and then, in his own time and fashion, he arrived at what he wanted to ask.
“Now I want you to tell this jury, Mrs. Greening, if at any time, during that night or thereafter, you discussed or talked of or chatted about the killing of Isom Chase with your husband?” asked Hammer.
“Oh laws, yes,” said Mrs. Greening.
The prosecuting attorney was rising slowly to his feet. He seemed concentrated on something; a frown knotted his brow, and he stood with his open hand poised as if to reach out quickly and check the flight of something which he expected to wing in and assail the jury.
Said Hammer, after wiping his glistening forehead with a yellow silk handkerchief:
“Yes. And now, Mrs. Greening, I will ask you if at any time your husband ever told you what was said, if anything, by any party inside of that house when he run up to the kitchen door that night and knocked?”
“I object!” said the prosecutor sharply, flinging out his ready hand.
“Don’t answer that question!” warned the judge.
Mrs. Greening had it on her lips; anybody who could read print on a signboard could have told what they were shaped to say. She held them there in their preliminary position of enunciation, pursed and wrinkled, like the tied end of a sausage-link.
“I will frame the question in another manner,” said Hammer, again feeling the need of his large handkerchief.
“There is no form that would be admissible, your honor,” protested the prosecutor. “It is merely hearsay that the counsel for the defense is attempting to bring out and get before the jury. I object!”
“Your course of questioning, Mr. Hammer, is highly improper, and in flagrant violation to the established rules of evidence,” said the judge. “You must confine yourself to proof by this witness of what she, of her own knowledge and experience, is cognizant of. Nothing else is permissible.”
“But, your honor, I intend to show by this witness that when Sol Greening knocked on that door––”
“I object! She wasn’t present; she has testified that she was at home at that time, and in bed.”
This from the prosecutor, in great heat.
“Your honor, I intend to prove–” began Hammer.
“This line of questioning is not permissible, as I told you before,” said the judge in stern reproof.
But Hammer was obdurate. He was for arguing it, and the judge ordered the sheriff to conduct the jury from the room. Mrs. Greening, red and uncomfortable, and all at
The judge, for no other purpose, evidently, than to prove to the defendant and public alike that he was unbiased and fair–knowing beforehand what his ruling must be–indulged Hammer until he expended his argument. Then he laid the matter down in few words.
Mrs. Greening had not been present when her husband knocked on the door of Isom Chase’s kitchen that night; she did not know, therefore, of her own experience what was spoken. No matter what her husband told her he said, or anybody else said, she could not repeat the words there under oath. It would be hearsay evidence, and such evidence was not admissible in any court of law. No matter how important such testimony might appear to one seeking the truth, the rules of evidence in civilized courts barred it. Mrs. Greening’s lips must remain sealed on what Sol said Joe said, or anybody said to someone else.
So the jury was called back, and Mrs. Greening was excused, and Hammer wiped off the sweat and pushed back his cuffs. And the people who had come in from their farmsteads to hear this trial by jury–all innocent of the traditions and precedents of practice of the law–marveled how it could be. Why, nine people out of nine, all over the township where Sol Greening lived, would take his wife’s word for anything where she and Sol had different versions of a story.
It looked to them like Sol had told the truth in the first place to his wife, and lied on the witness-stand. And here she was, all ready to show the windy old rascal up, and they wouldn’t let her. Well, it beat all two o’clock!
Of course, being simple people who had never been at a university in their lives, they did not know that Form and
And so it stood before the jury that Sol Greening had knocked on the door of Isom Chase’s kitchen that night and had not been bidden to enter, when everybody in the room, save the jury of twelve intelligent men–who had been taken out to keep their innocence untainted and their judgment unbiased by a gleam of the truth–knew that he had sat up there and lied.
Hammer cooled himself off after a few minutes of mopping, and called Ollie Chase to the witness-chair. Ollie seemed nervous and full of dread as she stood for a moment stowing her cloak and handbag in her mother’s lap. She turned back for her handkerchief when she had almost reached the little gate in the railing through which she must pass to the witness-chair. Hammer held it open for her and gave her the comfort of his hand under her elbow as she went forward to take her place.
A stir and a whispering, like a quick wind in a cornfield, moved over the room when Ollie’s name was called. Then silence ensued. It was more than a mere listening silence; it was impertinent. Everybody looked for a scandal, and most of them hoped that they should not depart that day with their long-growing hunger unsatisfied.
Ollie took the witness-chair with an air of extreme nervousness. As she settled down in her cloud of black skirt, black veil, and shadow of black sailor hat, she cast about the room a look of timid appeal. She seemed to be sounding the depths of the listening crowd’s sympathy, and to find it shallow and in shoals.
Hammer was kind, with an unctuous, patronizing gentleness.
Hammer brought out, with many confidential glances at the jury, the distance between Ollie’s room and the kitchen; the fact that she had her door closed, that she had gone to bed heavy with weariness, and was asleep long before midnight; that she had been startled by a sound, a strange and mysterious sound for that quiet house, and had sat up in her bed listening. Sol Greening had called her next, in a little while, even before she could master her fright and confusion and muster courage to run down the hall and call Joe.
Hammer did well with the witness; that was the general opinion, drawing from her a great deal about Joe’s habit of life in Isom’s house, a great deal about Isom’s temper, hard ways, and readiness to give a blow.
She seemed reluctant to discuss Isom’s faults, anxious, rather, to ease them over after the manner of one whose judgment has grown less severe with the lapse of time.
Had he ever laid hands on her in temper? Hammer wanted to know.
“Yes.” Her reply was a little more than a whisper, with head bent, with tears in her sad eyes. Under Hammer’s pressure she told about the purchase of the ribbon, of Isom’s iron hand upon her throat.
The women all over the room made little sounds of pitying deprecation of old Isom’s penury, and when Hammer drew from her, with evident reluctance on her part to yield it up, the story of her hard-driven, starved, and stingy life under Isom’s roof, they put their handkerchiefs to their eyes.
All the time Ollie was following Hammer’s kind leading, the prosecuting attorney was sitting with his hands clasped behind his head, balancing his weight on the hinder legs of his chair, his foot thrown over his knee. Apparently he was bored, even worried, by Hammer’s pounding attempts to make Isom out a man who deserved something slower and less merciful than a bullet, years before he came to his violent end.
Through it all Joe sat looking at Ollie, great pity for her forlorn condition and broken spirit in his honest eyes. She did not meet his glance, not for one wavering second. When she went to the stand she passed him with bent head; in the chair she looked in every direction but his, mainly at her hands, clasped in her lap.
At last Hammer seemed skirmishing in his mind in search of some stray question which might have escaped him, which he appeared unable to find. He turned his papers, he made a show of considering something, while the witness sat with her head bowed, her half-closed eyelids purple from much weeping, worrying, and watching for the coming of one who had taken the key to her poor, simple heart and gone his careless way.
“That’s all, Missis Chase,” said Hammer.
Ollie leaned over, picked up one of her gloves that had fallen to the floor, and started to leave the chair. Her relief was evident in her face. The prosecutor, suddenly alive, was on his feet. He stretched out his arm, staying her with a commanding gesture.
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Chase,” said he.
A stir of expectation rustled through the room again as Ollie resumed her seat. People moistened their lips, suddenly grown hot and dry.
“Now, just watch Sam Lucas!” they said.
“Now, Mrs. Chase,” began the prosecutor, assuming the
“Yes, sir.”
“This man Morgan, the book-agent, who had been boarding with you, had paid his bill and gone away?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And there was absolutely nobody in the house that night but yourself and Joe Newbolt?”
“Nobody else.”
“And you have testified, here on this witness-stand, before this court and this jury”–that being another small lawyer’s trick to impress the witness with a sense of his own unworthiness–“that you went to bed early that night. Now, where was Joe Newbolt?”
“I guess he was in bed,” answered Ollie, her lips white; “I didn’t go to see.”
“No, you didn’t go to see,” repeated the prosecutor with significant stress. “Very well. Where did your husband keep his money in the house?”
“I don’t know; I never saw any of it,” Ollie answered.
The reply drew a little jiggling laugh from the crowd. It rose and died even while Captain Taylor’s knuckles were poised over the panel of the door, and his loud rap fell too late for all, save one deep-chested farmer in a far corner, who must have been a neighbor of old Isom. This man’s raucous mirth seemed a roar above the quiet of the packed room. The prosecutor looked in his direction with a frown. The sheriff stood up and peered over that way threateningly.
“Preserve order, Mr. Sheriff,” said the judge severely.
The sheriff pounded the table with his hairy fist. “Now, I tell you I don’t want to hear no more of this!” said he.
The prosecutor was shaken out of his pose a bit by the court-room laugh. There is nothing equal to a laugh for that, to one who is laboring to impress his importance upon the world. It took him some time to get back to his former degree of heat, skirmishing around with incidental questioning. He looked over his notes, pausing. Then he faced Ollie again quickly, leveling his finger like a pointer of direct accusation.
“Did Joe Newbolt ever make love to you?” he asked.
Joe’s face flushed with resentful fire; but Ollie’s white calm, forced and strained that it was, remained unchanged.
“No, sir; he never did.”
“Did he ever kiss you?”
“No, I tell you, he didn’t!” Ollie answered, with a little show of spirit.
Hammer rose with loud and voluble objections, which had, for the first time during the proceedings, Joe’s hearty indorsement. But the judge waved him down, and the prosecutor pressed his new line of inquisition.
“You and Joe Newbolt were thrown together a good deal, weren’t you, Mrs. Chase–you were left there alone in the house while your husband was away in the field, and other places, frequently?”
“No, not very much,” said Ollie, shaking her head.
“But you had various opportunities for talking together alone, hadn’t you?”
“I never had a chance for anything but work,” said Ollie wearily.
Unawed by the sheriff’s warning, the assembly 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. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with
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
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 passing 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 shield 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 assumed the risk on that sad night to shield 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 passing curiosity, for Ollie could feel the concentration of these sober brown eyes
What had Joe told them? Had the coward betrayed her?
Ollie was assailed 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.
Hammer was in consultation with Joe and his mother. He seemed to be protesting and arguing, with a mighty spreading of the hands and shaking of the head. The judge was writing busily, making notes on his charge to the jury, it was supposed.
The prosecuting attorney took advantage of the momentary lull to get up and stretch his legs, which he did literally, one after the other, shaking his shanks to send down his crumpled pantaloons. He went to the window with lounging stride, hands in pockets, and pushed the sash a foot higher.
The jurymen, tired and unshaved, and over the momentary thrill of Ollie’s disclosure, lolled and sprawled in the box. It seemed that they now accepted the thing as settled, and the prospect of further waiting was boresome. The people set up a little whisper of talk, a clearing of throats, a blowing of noses, a shifting of feet, a general preparation and readjustment for settling down again to absorb all that might fall.
The country folk seated in the vicinity of Alice Price, among whom her fame had traveled far, whom many of their sons had loved, and languished for, and gone off to run streetcars on her account, turned their freed attention upon her, nudging, gazing, gossiping.
“Purty as a picture, ain’t she?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You set her ’longside of Bessie Craver over at Pink Hill”–and so on.
The judge looked up from his paper suddenly, as if the growing sound within the room had startled him out of his thought. His face wore a fleeting expression of surprise. He looked at the prosecutor, at the little group in conference at the end of the table below him, as if he did not understand. Then his judicial poise returned. He tapped with his pen on the inkstand.
“Gentlemen, proceed with the case,” said he.
The prosecuting attorney turned from the window with alacrity, and Hammer, sweating and shaking his head in one last gesture of protest to his client–who leaned back and folded his arms, with set and stubborn face–rose ponderously. He wiped his forehead with his great, broad handkerchief, and squared himself as if about to try a high hurdle or plunge away in a race.
“Joseph Newbolt, take the witness-chair,” said he.
