“NOT GUILTY”—“GUILTY”
Ridgway’s answer to the latest move of Simon Harley was to put him on
trial for his life to answer the charge of having plotted and
instigated the death of Vance Edwards. Not without reason, the defense
had asked for a change of venue, alleging the impossibility of securing
a fair trial at Mesa. The courts had granted the request and removed
the case to Avalanche.
On the second day of the trial Aline sat beside her husband, a dainty
little figure of fear, shrinking from the observation focused upon her
from all sides. The sight of her forlorn sensitiveness so touched
Ridgway’s heart that he telegraphed Virginia Balfour to come and help
support her through the ordeal.
Virginia came, and henceforth two women, both of them young and
unusually attractive, gave countenance to the man being tried for his
life. Not that he needed their support for himself, but for the effect
they might have on the jury. Harley had shrewdly guessed that the
white-faced child he had married, whose pathetic beauty was of so
haunting a type, and whose big eyes were so quick to reflect emotions,
would be a valuable asset to set against the black-clad widow of Vance
Edwards.
For its effect upon himself, so far as the trial was concerned, Simon
Harley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wrecker
carried an iron face to the ordeal. His leathern heart was as foreign
to fear as to pity. The trial was an unpleasant bore to him, but
nothing worse. He had, of course, cast an anchor of caution to windward
by taking care to have the jury fixed. For even though his array of
lawyers was a formidably famous one, he was no such child as to trust
his case to a Western jury on its merits while the undercurrent of
popular opinion was setting so strongly against him. Nor had he
neglected to see that the court-room was packed with detectives to
safeguard him in the event that the sympathy of the attending miners
should at any time become demonstrative against him.
The most irritating feature of the trial to the defendant was the
presence of the little woman in black, whose burning eyes never left
for long his face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, but
nobody in the court-room was more sure of that look of enduring,
passionate hatred than its victim. He had made her a widow, and her
heart cried for revenge. That was the story the eyes told dumbly.
From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with the
realization among those present—except for that somber figure in black,
whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant—that it was another move in the
fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorney had worked
up his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing a
conviction, but to mass a total of evidence that would condemn the
Consolidated leader-before the world.
To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process of
sweating to turn State’s evidence against his master. His testimony
made things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, a
palpably unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgway
adherents were openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made much
of the fact that Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after a
disagreement with the defendant and had been elected to the senate by
his enemies, but the impression made by his moderation and the fine
restraint of his manner, combined with his reputation for scrupulous
honesty, was not to be shaken by the subtle innuendos and blunt
aspersions of the legal array he faced.
Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart’s
testimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a bad
hour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley had
personally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for the
almost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him time
to recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.
Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotel
elevator—for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found it
necessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best,
an alternative not to his fastidious taste—rallied him upon the
predicament in which he had found himself.
“It’s pretty hard to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, without making indiscreet admissions about one’s friends,
isn’t it?” he asked, with his genial smile.
“Did I make any indiscreet admissions?”
“I don’t say you did, though you didn’t look as if you were enjoying
yourself. I picked up an impression that you had your back to the wall;
seemed to me the jury rather sized it up that way, Mott.”
“We’ll know what the jury thinks in a few days.”
“Shall we?” the other laughed aloud. “Now, I’m wondering whether we
shall know what they really think.”
“If you mean that the jury has been tampered with it is your duty to
place your evidence before the court, Mr. Ridgway.”
“When I hear the verdict I’ll tell you what I think about the jury,”
returned the president of the Ore-producing Company, with easy
impudence as he passed into the elevator.
At the second floor Waring left it and turned toward the ladies’
parlor. It had seemed to him that Aline had looked very tired and frail
at the morning session, and he wanted to see Virginia about arranging
to have them take a long drive into the country that afternoon. He had
sent his card up with a penciled note to the effect that he would wait
for her in the parlor.
But when he stepped through the double doorway of the ornate room it
was to become aware of a prior occupant. She was reclining on a divan
at the end of the large public room. Neither lying nor sitting, but
propped up among a dozen pillows with head and limbs inert and the long
lashes drooped on the white cheeks, Aline looked the pathetic figure of
a child fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion after a long strain.
Since he was the man he was, unhampered by any too fine sense of what
was fitting, he could no more help approaching than he could help the
passionate pulse of pity that stirred in his heart at sight of her
forlorn weariness.
Her eyes opened to find his grave compassion looking down at her. She
showed no surprise at his presence, though she had not previously known
of it. Nor did she move by even so much as the stir of a limb.
“This is wearing you out,” he said, after the long silence in which her
gaze was lost helplessly in his. “You must go home—away from it all.
You must forget it, and if it ever crosses your mind think of it as
something with which you have no concern.”
“How can I do that—now.”
The last word slipped out not of her will, but from an undisciplined
heart. It stood for the whole tangled story of her troubles: the
unloved marriage which had bereft her of her heritage of youth and joy,
the love that had found her too late and was so poignant a fount of
distress to her, the web of untoward circumstance in which she was so
inextricably entangled.
“How did you ever come to do it?” he asked roughly, out of the bitter
impulse of his heart.
She knew that the harshness was not for her, as surely as she knew what
he meant by his words.
“I did wrong. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. Though even
then I felt troubled about it. But my guardian said it was best, and I
knew so little. Oh, so very, very little. Why was I not taught things,
what every girl has a right to know—until life teaches me—too late?”
Nothing he could say would comfort her. For the inexorable facts
forbade consolation. She had made shipwreck of her life before the
frail raft of her destiny had well pushed forth from harbor. He would
have given much to have been able to take the sadness out of her great
childeyes, but he knew that not even by the greatness of his desire
could he take up her burden. She must carry it alone or sink under it.
“You must go away from here back to your people. If not now, then as
soon as the trial is over. Make him take you to your friends for a
time.”
“I have no friends that can help me.” She said it in an even little
voice of despair.
“You have many friends. You have made some here. Virginia is one.” He
would not name himself as only a friend, though he had set his iron
will to claim no more.
“Yes, Virginia is my friend. She is good to me. But she is going to
marry you, and then you will both forget me.”
“I shall never forget you.” He cried it in a low, tense voice, his
clenched hands thrust into the pockets of his sack coat.
Her wan smile thanked him. It was the most he would let himself say.
Though her heart craved more, she knew she must make the most of this.
“I came up to see Virginia,” he went on, with a change of manner. “I
want her to take you driving this afternoon. Forget about that wretched
trial if you can. Nothing of importance will take place to-day.”
He turned at the sound of footsteps, and saw that Miss Balfour had come
into the room.
“I want you to take Mrs. Harley into the fresh sunshine and clear air
this afternoon. I have been telling her to forget this trial. It’s a
farce, anyhow. Nothing will come of it. Take her out to the Homes—take
and cheer her up.”
“Yes, my lord.” Virginia curtseyed obediently.
“It will do you good, too.”
She shot a mocking little smile at him. “It’s very good of you to think
of me.”
“Still, I do sometimes.”
“Whenever it is convenient,” she added.
But with Aline watching them the spirit of badinage in him was
overmatched. He gave it up and asked what kind of a rig he should send
round. Virginia furnished him the necessary specifications, and he
turned to go.
As he left the room Simon Harley entered. They met face to face, and
after an instant’s pause each drew aside to allow the other to pass.
The New Yorker inclined his head silently and moved forward toward his
wife. Ridgway passed down the corridor and into the elevator.
As the days of the trial passed excitement grew more tense. The lawyers
for the prosecution and the defense made their speeches to a crowded
and enthralled court-room. There was a feverish uncertainty in the air.
It reached a climax when the jury stayed out for eleven hours before
coming to a verdict. From the moment it filed back into the court-room
with solemn faces the dramatic tensity began to foreshadow the tragedy
about to be enacted. The woman Harley had made a widow sat erect and
rigid in the seat where she had been throughout the trial. Her eyes
blazed with a hatred that bordered madness. Ridgway had observed that
neither Aline Harley nor Virginia was present, and a note from the
latter had just reached him to the effect that Aline was ill with the
strain of the long trial. Afterward Ridgway could never thank his pagan
gods enough that she was absent.
There was a moment of tense waiting before the judge asked:
“Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
The foreman rose. “We have, your honor.”
A folded note was handed to the judge. He read it slowly, with an
inscrutable face.
“Is this your verdict, gentlemen of the jury?”
“It is, your honor.”
Silence, full and rigid, held the room after the words “Not guilty” had
fallen from the lips of the judge. The stillness was broken by a shock
as of an electric bolt from heaven.
The exploding echoes of a pistol-shot reverberated. Men sprang wildly
to their feet, gazing at each other in the distrust that fear
generates. But one man was beyond being startled by any more earthly
sounds. His head fell forward on the table in front of him, and a thin
stream of blood flowed from his lips. It was Simon Harley, found
guilty, sentenced, and executed by the judge and jury sitting in the
outraged, insane heart of the woman he had made a widow.
Mrs. Edwards had shot him through the head with a revolver she had
carried in her shoppingbag to exact vengeance in the event of a
miscarriage of justice.