About five minutes before the arrival of Judge Helm in the court-room
Sheriff Plummer, having all his arrangements perfected, slipped out and
proceeded to the jail, and in a few moments emerged therefrom with Scott
Jackson handcuffed to his arm.
With a nervous smile and a forced jauntiness, which accorded illy with
his visible perturbation, Scott Jackson stepped from the old jail door
in Newport and started through the dense lines of curious men, women and
children for the court of justice, wherein his fight for life will be
made. He was handcuffed to Sheriff Plummer, and, as a further
precaution, was flanked on either side by a stalwart deputy.
Jackson seemed in good humor as he walked from the jail, and did not
show the same dread for the Newport crowds that he had displayed on the
two former occasions upon which he passed through them. He was taken
upstairs in the Courthouse and placed in the witness room to await the
opening of court.
Ordinarily, a man facing death excites sympathy, particularly among the
class who waited for two hours to get a glimpse of Jackson. But the most
casual observer could not fail to see that the populace was singularly
unanimous in its intense hostility to the supposed and accused murderers
of Pearl Bryan.
A man may be a murderer and a hero in the minds of many. But nothing but
deep-seated and virulent hostility was manifested by ninety-nine out of
every hundred of those who gathered about the Courthouse in Newport and
reviewed the famous crime in infinite detail. "He'll hang, and he ought
to, ---- him," said one big fellow in the center of a listening group.
"Yes, and Walling out to follow him in five minutes," said a bare-headed
working woman, as she shifted a baby from arm to arm. The same sullen
antipathy was apparent as Jackson passed through the crowd. It was
indisputably general.