TE MORITURI SALUTAMUS
IF it was late in the day when Jarvis left the Plainsman building armed
with his chief’s request for an order to visit the prisoner in the
jail, it was still later when the formalities were finally appeased
and he gained access to the inner fastnesses of the city’s house of
detention and to Brant’s cell.
Having but now parted from Dorothy, Brant was in the seventh heaven
of love’s aftermath when the cell door opened to admit the reporter;
and since love breaks ground for far-reaching kindliness, the
news-gatherer’s welcome was all that could be desired.
“I wonder if any unlucky dog of them all ever had better friends or
more of them than I have, Jarvis? The way you all stand by me would
warm the cockles of a worse heart than mine ever was.” Thus the
prisoner of good hope, love-tempered; and Jarvis laughed.
“You don’t deserve to have any friends. May I sit on your bed? Thanks.
A fellow that loses the combination on his tongue the way you have
ought to be hanged on general principles. But you’ve got to talk to me,
or thrash me, one of the two.”
“I’ll do both, if you insist,” said Brant with cheerful levity. “Which
will you have first?”
“The answers to two or three questions first, and then, if there is any
fight left in you, we’ll see about the thrashing.”
“Go ahead. What is it you want to know?” said the aforetime bondsman of
reticence.
“A lot of things that you can’t tell me, and some few that you can. Did
you at one time have a gun--a Colt’s forty-five--that had once belonged
to Harding?”
Brant lost levity and freedom of speech in the dropping of an eyelid,
but he could not in common fairness refuse to answer.
“I did.”
“Did you have this admirable weapon about you on the night of the
shooting?”
“No.”
“Where was it at that time?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do know,” said the cross-examiner placidly. “You had lost
it, hadn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Now I am going to hazard a guess--dang the thing! it’s
all guesses, so far--and I shall know if I’ve hit it whether you admit
it or not. You left that gun in your room the night of the burglary,
and you haven’t seen it since.”
Brant did not attempt to deny it. “That is also true,” he admitted.
“So far, so good. Now, do you know who it was who broke into your room,
and slept in your bed, and stole your artillery?”
“I think I do, but I don’t care to discuss that point with you.”
“You needn’t, if you don’t want to. But it will be discussed in open
court next week.”
Brant’s start was not lost upon the young man, who had apparently
missed his vocation in electing to be a journalist rather than a
detective.
“Why should it come up at the trial?” Brant demanded.
“Because it is going to have a very considerable bearing on the case,”
said Jarvis coolly. “The man who took the pistol from your room gave it
back to Harding.”
“How do you know he did?”
Jarvis leered. “He did, or he didn’t; one of the two. I believe he
didn’t.”
“More theories,” said Brant, not without sarcasm. “What difference does
it make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world when you come to tie it to
the fact that Harding was killed with that same weapon.”
This time Brant’s start was visible to the naked eye of the least
critical observer, but his rejoinder was well measured and calm:
“What is your theory? Set it in words.”
Jarvis settled himself on the cot, nursing one knee in his clasped
hands and chewing an extinct cigar. “It’s as simple as twice two. You
heard young Langford’s testimony at the preliminary examination?”
“Naturally, being within a few feet of him when he gave it.”
“Very good. You were in that card room at the Osirian and saw what he
saw. Did he tell the truth?”
Brant was silent.
“You know he didn’t tell the truth; or, at least, he didn’t tell all
of it,” Jarvis went on. “He said that Harding drew a pistol on him,
but he did not say that he had already drawn his own. Also, he left
the inference wide open that the big pistol on the table, the pistol
from which the shot was fired, was Harding’s--that Harding had laid it
there. That wasn’t so.”
Brant sprang to his feet in a frenzy of impatience. “For God’s sake,
have done with this beating about the bush and tell me what you know or
what you suspect!”
Jarvis complied in set phrase. “This: Young Langford was the man who
broke into your room. He was the man who took the pistol, who carried
it all the next day, who drew it upon Harding, who--” He broke off
abruptly, leaving the categorical accusation unfinished. “You know
what happened just as well as I do. It was that young cub who did the
shooting, and you are here because--well, I know the why and wherefore
of that, too, but we needn’t go into it. You’ve been all sorts of a Don
Quixote, and I believe you’d keep it up to the finish, if you had your
way. But it won’t go, George.”
Brant said nothing. He was leaning against the wall, just where Dorothy
had stood a little while before, and there was a far-away look in his
eyes--the look that comes into the eyes of a soldier when duty calls
and death beckons. But Jarvis was not skilled in reading face signs,
and he went on, secure in the worldly wisdom of his own point of view.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine thing. If you had lived two or three
centuries ago they would have drawn and quartered you first and made
a demigod of you afterward. But it won’t go now. When people find
out, half of them will laugh at you, and the other half will say you
ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum. If you could have carried it
through----”
Brant came out of his reverie and sat down on the cot beside the
exponent of worldly wisdom.
“You say, if I could have carried it through,” he broke in. “But now?”
“Now there is nothing to do but to switch over and pull in harness with
common sense. It will all come out at the trial--it’s bound to. The
judge is making believe that he is going to be your counsel, whether or
no; but you know you are not going to allow it, and the upshot of that
will be that the court will appoint somebody else to defend you, and
it is ten to one that it will be some keen young fellow with nothing to
lose and everything to gain. There are a dozen young lawyers keeping
up with the case, and any one of them will snap at the chance. And you
know as well as I do what will happen if any lawyer in the wide world,
save and excepting his own father, gets a chance to cross-examine Will
Langford.”
Brant nodded, as one who may not controvert a self-evident fact. But
what he said brought the reporter’s card house of hypotheses tumbling
in ruins.
“You have made your case, Jarvis, and summed it up, but there is one
small flaw in it. You are taking it for granted that young Langford
killed Harding, and that I did not. What if I say that your basic
premises are wrong?”
Jarvis laughed, but it was not the laugh of assurance. “You can’t bluff
me out, George; I know what I know.”
“You don’t know anything. You are merely guessing from beginning to
end.”
Jarvis took time to think about it, and assurance slipped still farther
into the abyss of incertitude.
“If it is only a guess, you can make it a certainty,” he said at length.
Brant smiled. “You would hardly expect me to tie the rope around my
own neck, even in a confidential talk with you. But I will tell you a
little, and you may infer the rest--you are pretty good at inferences.
My quarrel with Harding was of the deadly sort, and it had been going
on for years. A few weeks ago I ran him out of town, telling him
plainly that if he came back I should kill him. After he had gone I
learned that he had done a thing for which there was no such word as
forgiveness, and I swore then, and wrote it down in a letter, that his
chance for life lay in keeping out of my way. Can you put two and two
together?”
Jarvis nodded slowly. “You’ve buried me and my little theory six feet
deep, with a stone atop, and--and I’m honestly sorry. I couldn’t
believe you’d do a thing like that in cold blood, George.”
“Do you call it cold blood? There were three of us in that eight-by-ten
shambles that night, and somebody had to die.”
The turnkey was unlocking the door, and Jarvis rose.
“I guess there isn’t anything more to say,” he said. “Can I do anything
for you?”
“Yes; you may take a line to Forsyth for me, if you will.” And then to
the jailer: “One minute, Carson, until I write a note.”
The note was written, and Jarvis took his leave, wringing Brant’s hand
at parting quite as heartily as he would if the card house of guesses
had not been wrecked.
“You’ve simply made another friend, old man,” he whispered. “It was
mostly curiosity with me before, but now I’ll stand by you while the
lamp holds out to burn.”
Brant returned the hand grip, but his smile had in it more than
gratitude. “I’ll let you know when you can do anything,” he promised;
and then the iron door came between.
The reporter found his chief waiting impatiently for his return, and
Forsyth was soon acquainted not only with Jarvis’s guesses, but with
the main points in the late interview.
“That’s all,” said Jarvis in conclusion, “except that he gave me this
note for you.”
Forsyth read the note and swore gratefully.
“You are to be congratulated, Jarvis; you have done what none of the
rest of us have been able to do. He consents to accept Judge Langford
as his counsel.” And the editor went quickly to the telephone to call
up the house in the Highlands.
This was the skirling of the bell which had interrupted the master of
Hollywood as he was sitting down to his dinner, and which had made
Dorothy linger on the stair to hear what should come of it.
“What is it, papa?” she asked, when her father replaced the earpiece in
its hook.
“It is a message from Mr. Forsyth. Brant has notified him that he will
accept me as his counsel, and has promised not to obstruct us any more.
You may take that for a grain of comfort.”
But Dorothy still lingered. “Is the time set for the trial, papa?”
“Yes; Tuesday of next week. But don’t grieve till you must. We shall be
ready, and we shall do all there is to be done.”
“One week from to-day--one little week!” She said it over and over to
herself in the darkness after her father had gone back to the dining
room, and the grain of comfort was swallowed up in foreboding.
The week of waiting was outworn at length, slowly for the State’s
attorneys, since their case was already made, but all too swiftly for
Brant’s friends. At the end of it Judge Langford went into court with
as little of weight to say for his client as any advocate of a man who
was already tried and found guilty by public opinion could have. Of
that little he made the best possible use, and his eloquent plea to the
jury had in it all the fire and fervour and pathos of a strong man who
had once been the ablest special pleader in a section where eloquence
is in some sort a birthright.
But the judge fought a losing battle from the beginning; he knew it,
and all the others knew it. Though the prisoner had receded from his
original determination, and had pleaded “Not guilty,” the plea was
taken to be wholly a matter of form. His guilt was tacitly admitted by
all, and the judge’s appeal was for clemency rather than for acquittal.
“_If_ this man had done this thing,” was the preface to each fresh
outburst of eloquent beseeching.
None the less the effort proved unavailing. Forsyth had prophesied
truly. Public sentiment was aroused, and there was need enough for a
stern example on the side of strict justice. Brant’s friends saw all
this written out large in the faces of the jury, and were prepared
for the verdict. As a mere matter of decent formality the twelve men
left the jury box at the close of the judge’s charge to them; but they
were back again before the hum of comment in the crowded courtroom
was fairly a-buzz. And in the silence which fell upon all the foreman
announced the verdict. The prisoner at the bar had been found guilty as
charged.
There was a little hush, the electrified stillness which precedes a
death sentence in any court, and then Judge Langford rose to give
notice that an appeal would be taken. The court heard him through
patiently, and sentence was suspended accordingly. Then the prisoner
was remanded to jail, and the trial was over.
Judge Langford had no hope of securing a new trial, and he admitted as
much when Forsyth got speech with him. “It was the only thing there was
left for us to do,” he said, “and we shall gain nothing by it save a
little delay. But having undertaken to plough this young man’s furrow,
I shall plough it faithfully to the end.”
Once more, as on a former occasion, the judge’s forecasting was rooted
in the event. The motion for a retrial was argued, heard, and denied;
the prisoner was sentenced, and the day of execution was set for the
Friday before Thanksgiving. And at the pronouncing of the sentence that
Friday was no more than a fortnight in the future.