illness, and each hour of her silence, after he believed that she must
be aware of his position, buried deeper his hope that she would confess
when she discovered that he had assumed the suspicion of her mad crime.
With bitterness he reflected that the devotion of so fantastic a
creature was no more to be trusted than her moral principles; and bound
though he felt himself to shelter her, he yearned for the happiness and
honor she alone could restore to him.
Whether Pryor lived or died, his own career must end in a darkness whose
varying degrees seemed to Jerry scarcely worth remark. This story of
treacherous vengeance would be told to his own people, and to the woman
he loved. Oh, God! How his soul adored her purity, her pride, the
girlish exaltation for which he had used to profess a tender ridicule!
Had he been cruelly unjust to her, and to those others who were dear to
him? Yet would he not have been unutterably base had he crawled to
safety across the condemnation of Rosita, whose crime had resulted from
misguided love for him?
Like most of his compeers, Jerry had a character which was one of action
rather than of thought. In the sleepless thought of those forty-eight
hours his boyishness slipped from him forever, and he attained the full
stature of his manhood--God help us!--as most of humanity does so attain
in the forcing-house of suffering!
Twilight had come the second time when Captain Blount knocked at the
door of Jerry’s quarters.
'I think the lieutenant is asleep--and it’s the first rest he has had,
sir'--Jackson hesitated.
'I’ve news for him that he will like better than sleeping! His arrest is
over!' Blount cried, entering.
Jerry lay back, unawakened, in the only armchair the unluxurious room
possessed. Blount stared down at the haggard young face, with a blending
of affection and resentment which made a very complete perplexity. Not
until he touched the sleeper’s shoulder did the heavy lids lift slowly.
'I’ve nothing to say,' Jerry murmured half consciously.
'I am sure of it, you donkey! Pryor, however, has said something, and
the whole crowd of us must beg your pardon, though you have yourself to
blame that we suspected you.'
'Pryor has spoken? What does he say?'
'The surgeon will not let him talk; but he insisted on hearing who was
accused, and he acquitted you at once. Now I want you to tell me what
confounded quixotism kept you silent, at such cost, if, as seems
probable from his despondency, he attempted his own life.'
Jerry frowned, and looked away into the gathering shadows.
'Despondent is he, poor chap?' he asked presently.
'Even less thankful to be alive than you seem to be free again.'
Jerry sat upright, his pale face flushing, his eyes shining.
'I? Not thankful?' he cried in a voice shaken to the verge of an utter
breakdown. 'I have been in hell these two days, and you have brought me
out--but--but--go away, Blount, or I shall make a fool of myself!'
Lieutenant Breton was breakfasting late the next morning, when Pryor’s
orderly appeared with an immediate summons to the commanding officer’s
presence. War, armed _cap-à-pie_, sprang into existence in Jerry’s heart
at this summons. He had proved Pryor capable of tyranny without reason,
and could not hope, when the spirit of such a man had been as cruelly
wounded as his body, that he would incline to mercy. But in the
blessedness of his own safety he forgave Rosita her silence, and, while
aware of the perplexities that would beset him, he vowed that no
admission of her guilt should be extorted from him.
There was, however, neither wrath nor challenge in the hollow eyes which
confronted him when he stood beside Pryor’s bed, and a gaunt hand feebly
moved across the counterpane toward him.
'You are a fine fellow, Breton,' the major murmured. 'I beg your
pardon!'
Jerry dumbly clasped the quivering fingers.
'They have told me that you flung a pistol over the bluffs,' Pryor
continued slowly. 'Of course I know whose pistol it was. But I wish you
to understand that the shooting was my fault, like the whole affair. I
provoked her with words I had no right to speak; I denied her the mere
justice she demanded. Except for your courage I should have brought
disgrace upon her, as I have brought death.'
'Death? Rosita?'
'She died last night.'
Jerry dropped into a chair. Death! Rosita!--a creature so instinct with
the life of this world that it was impossible to conceive her in the
life of which death is the portal.
'Did she--' He shuddered.
'No! She never rallied from the shock of that night. Her father has been
here to ask me to forgive the dead. My God! I shall not forgive myself!'
Pryor cried, with an anguish none the less intense for the faintness of
the voice which uttered it.
Jerry had covered his face, and the other stared enviously at the tears
that slipped through his fingers.
'Time is up!' the surgeon exclaimed from outside the closed door.
The eyes of the two men met wistfully.
'I have deserved no favor from you,' Pryor muttered; 'neither is it for
my sake that I entreat you to continue silent. There will be no further
inquiry into the matter, as the surgeon tells me that I shall recover.
So the garrison must be satisfied only with conjecture as to my
temporary madness and your magnanimity.'
'It is you who are magnanimous!'
'I loved her; I persecuted her! The death she desired for me was mercy
compared to the life which is all the atonement I can make to her
memory.'
With which exceeding bitter whisper Pryor turned himself to the wall.
Out on the parade, the radiant freshness of the prairie morning thrilled
Jerry’s young veins with an ecstasy of living, and a sharp pang of
compassion stabbed his heart.
Misguided, bewitching,--ah, yes, and loving,--Rosita lay dead in the
midst of the summer gladness that seemed akin to her. He pulled his cap
over his eyes, and, ignoring some cordial greetings, walked hurriedly
to the post-trader’s quarters. Presently Lawless came to him in the
little drawing-room, which was unfamiliarly dark and still.
'God bless you!' he said, laying a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. 'Those
words do not mean much to me. I’ve wished they did since last night. But
you will understand from them that I am grateful. Hush! I have nothing
to forgive you. Nor had she. Will you come to see her? She never knew
that you were shielding her, or she would have confessed; and she wished
you to see her--if she looked pretty.'
Pretty, indeed! Poor flower of a people Christianized just enough to
suffer for the savage instincts they do not learn to control! She lay
with a crucifix between the hands which seemed so childish, and were so
guilty.
'Remember her like this,' Lawless continued. Remember, too, that she
loved you; not as the women of our race love, when nature is subdued by
civilization and ruled by religion, but with the limitless love of a
squaw for her chief, knowing neither right nor wrong in her devotion to
him. For under her daintiness and her sweetness Rosita was a squaw.'
Across her grave three men kept silence. There is another regiment at
Lawrence now, and when the ----th Cavalry remember what they beheld of
this story, they glance at their quiet major with wonder for his
fleeting madness. Only the surgeon and one or two ladies murmur to their
own thoughts, 'Rosita?'
PERJURED
BY EDITH RONALD MIRRIELEES
A lie well stuck to--
IT began with no more than a word, such as a man might speak and forget
he had spoken. At the time of speaking, Robbins Nelson was standing with
a group of other youths--lads in their late 'teens and early
twenties--on the Sutro Station platform. All their eyes were on the
approaching train, and all their tongues were busy with a single topic.
Robbins was the youngest member of the group--barely turned sixteen.
Usually he hung somewhat unregarded on its edge, but to-day, bold in the
possession of first-hand knowledge, he thrust himself into the heart of
the talk.
'I looked right down on him, close as I am to you. I was walking along
over that cut where the train comes through. Gee, his head looked
three-cornered! I yelled, but the engineer didn’t know what I meant.
Anyhow, they wouldn’t have stopped--nothing but a hobo.'
'No good if they had,' an older speaker took up the words. 'He was done
for. Didn’t speak but once after they got him off. "Don’t hit me," he
says. I s’pose when they run into the tunnel and whatever it was jammed
into him--'
'He didn’t get hurt in any tunnel,' Robbins asserted. The color flared
into his face with the intensity of his conviction. The horrid memory of
the man set him to blinking. 'He couldn’t get hurt if he was lying down,
could he? And if he was standing up, it’d knock him off, wouldn’t it? It
wasn’t any tunnel--'
He broke off, aware suddenly of the smiling ridicule in the faces round
him. Grotend, brother-in-law to the coroner who had held the inquest,
laughed good-temperedly.
'Go it, William J. Burns, Junior! I s’pose some fancy murderer crawled
up on top between stations. Or he got jolted down out of an air-ship.
It’d take something like that--'
Grotend was popular with the group. Their ready laughter rewarded the
attack. And the younger boy’s crimson misery was an invitation to
further teasing.
'You hadn’t ought to be stingy with bright ideas like that, Nelse. He
sent you an anonymous letter, didn’t he? Or maybe you saw a man in a
black mask beating him up--'
'No, I didn’t!' said Robbins loudly. He cast about desperately in his
mind for a means of escape. 'I didn’t see anybody beating him up, but I
saw Jim Whiting coming down off the end of the car.'
A hush followed his statement--a tribute to the weight of it. Grotend,
his lips parted for a fresh jibe, drew in his breath sharply as though
in the shock of a cold douche. Then,--
'You saw Jim Whiting?' he reiterated.
Jim Whiting was brakeman on the local freight, a figure familiar enough
to all of them.
'Getting deaf, aren’t you?' Robbins retorted.
He turned his back upon his tormentors and walked away across the
platform.
He was not much impressed with the importance of his lie. Chiefly, he
was elated that there had come to him a lie suitable to turn the tables.
Half-way home his elation lasted, to be crowded out only by the
recurring memory of the injured tramp. The boy had never before seen
violent death. The picture of the man as he sped past, bloody and
misshapen, on the swaying car-top; the later picture of him borne up the
street on the improvised stretcher, came back upon him hideously. That
for such destruction, for such wanton suffering, there should be no
punishable agent, seemed intolerable. And the idea once presented, who
so likely as Whiting--
He heard the beat of footsteps behind him, and Grotend, breathing
quickly, swung into pace at his side.
'I been trying to catch up with you,' he explained unnecessarily. 'Say,
when Jim come out on the platform, I spoke to him. I says, "One of the
fellows says he saw you up on top that day the tramp got hurt." And
you’d ought to seen him. I guess he knew--'
'What’d he say?' Robbins interrupted.
'All he says was, "You tell that fellow he’s a liar"; but if you’d seen
the look on him--,'
'Don’t you tell him I said it,' the younger boy cautioned. 'I don’t want
him down on me.' A belated stir of conscience set him to hedging.
'Anyhow, I didn’t say I saw him up on the car. All I saw was when he was
just there on those iron steps on the side. I don’t know if he was going
up or down.'
They stood at the Nelson gate for a little, talking. It was full dark
when Robbins went up the shrub-lined path to the porch. In the lighted
dining-room his mother and the younger children were already at supper.
'Late, Robbins,' Mrs. Nelson admonished as he slid into his place. Then,
catching sight of his face, 'Tired out? If it’s that accident that’s
worrying you--'
'It’s not,' the boy denied. He felt his cheeks grow hot with a sudden
flush of annoyance. 'I don’t see what I’d worry about that for. Only,
Charlie Grotend told Mr. Whiting I saw him on the car that day, and it
made Whiting mad. I was wishing he hadn’t.'
'You didn’t say anything more than that--that he could have helped it,
or anything like that? Well, then!' She put the discussion aside with a
gesture. 'Merle Williams telephoned to see if you’d come over there
to-night. You might as well. There’s no use brooding--'
'I’m _not!_' Robbins flung back angrily.
His spirits lightened somewhat in the process of dressing for his
outing. They lightened still more when, on his way to the place of
entertainment, he came up with three or four of his mates similarly
bound, and went on with them, easily the hero of the little group.
Sutro, though a county seat, was a place of few excitements. The finding
of the injured tramp, his death, the inquest, which had been held that
day, were topics of surpassing interest, and Robbins, by virtue of his
momentary contact, found his importance measurably enhanced. Before the
evening was over, he had told his story a half-dozen times, each time
with less repulsion, with a keener sense of its dramatic value.
'I was walking along the cut--you know, there where the train goes under
you--and I saw him and yelled at the engineer to stop. I thought he was
dead already--he looked like it. I don’t know what I yelled for, only I
thought he’d roll off. No, I didn’t say I saw Whiting up on top,--' He
adhered scrupulously to the form of his first telling,--'I saw him on
those steps on the side. I’d called to him, too, if I’d seen him in
time, but I didn’t.'
'I bet he’d have understood,' suggested one of the listeners.
There was something cynical, something appalling, in the fashion in
which their untempered youth seized upon the idea of guilt as the
concomitant of injury. Robbins, tramping home a half-hour after
midnight, felt all round him the concurrence of his mates--a warm
supporting wave. He was committed beyond retreat now to his theory.
Almost he was self-deceived. Visualizing the scene, he could scarcely
have said whether, actually, he saw Whiting’s big body flattened against
the side of the car, or whether he himself had superimposed the detail.
He slept late next morning, and emerging, discovered his mother,
red-eyed, moving restlessly between kitchen and dining-room. She called
to him as he came out, but it was not until he was seated before his
oven-dried breakfast that, with a long breath, as though she braced
herself,--
'Mrs. Cartwright was here this morning,' she observed.
The words were indifferent, but the tone was so full of significance
that instinctively the boy stopped eating to listen.
'She’d been sitting up last night with Mrs. Morgan. Robbins, that
boy--that poor boy--wasn’t a tramp at all. He was Charlie Morgan, trying
to beat his way back home.'
'How’d they know?' Robbins asked.
'Something about the body. There was some mark. It’s dreadful for his
mother. And it’s worse because she thinks--Mrs. Cartwright says a good
many people think--it wasn’t an accident at all. The wound don’t look
like it. And then your seeing Mr. Whiting--'
'What’d you tell her that for?' Robbins muttered.
He pushed back his chair, his hunger vanished as if from feasting.
'I didn’t. She told me. She says that man who has the
truck-garden--Emerson, isn’t it?--is saying he saw Mr. Whiting on the
car-roof and recognized him. But, of course, a man like that--'
Her tone disposed effectually of the second witness. She got to her feet
and began to gather up the dishes from the table.
'Mrs. Cartwright says Mr. Cartwright’s looking into the thing. In his
position, he’d have to. I told her you’d go up to his office.' She was
passing behind Robbins’s chair as she spoke. To his amazement, she
stooped and laid her cheek for an instant against his shoulder. 'Don’t
you let him worry you, Robbie. You just stick to your story,' she
counseled.
'I’m not going near him,' Robbins declared defiantly.
More than the hush of appreciation at his first statement, more than the
news of Whiting’s anger, his mother’s unexpected caress impressed upon
him the seriousness of his position.
When he left the house, breakfast ended, he was fixed in his
determination neither to get within reach of Cartwright, who was county
attorney, nor to repeat his story. But once upon the street he found to
his consternation that the story no longer needed his repetition. It
traveled on every tongue, growing as it went. Nor was there lacking
other evidence to support it. The examining physician shook his head
over the shape and nature of the fatal wound; the helpers who had
carried the man were swift to recollect his dying words. From somewhere
there sprang the rumor of long-standing feud between Whiting and Charlie
Morgan. Then it was no more a rumor but an established fact--time,
place, and enhancing circumstances all known and repeated.
'Enough to hang anybody,' Grotend summed up the evidence, following with
his coterie the trend of gossip. 'Only thing is, it’s funny the sort of
people that do all the hearing and seeing.' He put his arm round
Robbins’s shoulders. 'There’s Nelse here and Doc. Simpson--they’re all
right; but look at the rest of 'em--If they said it was a nice day, I’d
know it was raining. Take that Emerson fellow--'
'Well, if Nelse saw him on the side, I don’t see why Emerson couldn’t
see him up on top; he must 'a' been there,' a listener protested. And
Robbins, his throat constricted, drew out of hearing.
For the most part, however, he found a lively satisfaction in the
increase of rumor. In such a mass of testimony, he reasoned, his own bit
of spurious evidence was wholly unimportant. When that day and a second
and still a third had passed with no demand upon him, his oppression
vanished. Even the news of Whiting’s arrest did not greatly disturb him.
There was now and then a minute of sick discomfort,--once when the
truck-gardener attempted to hob-nob with him on the strength of their
common information; once and more acutely when an overheard conversation
warned him that the accused man was depending on an alibi,--but for the
most part he put the danger of discovery resolutely out of his mind.
Even should the alibi be forthcoming and his own story go thereby to the
ground, 'They can’t be sure about it,' he comforted himself. 'They can’t
know I didn’t--' Even in his thought he left the phrase unfinished.
It was the fourth day after Whiting’s arrest that, going toward home in
the early evening, he heard his name spoken from behind, and turning,
saw the county attorney. His first barely inhibited impulse was toward
flight, but it was already too late for that. The elder man’s greeting
detained him as by a hand upon his arm. He halted reluctantly, and they
went on side by side.
The county attorney was a man in his early sixties--a tall stooping
figure, gray-haired, with an habitual courtesy of manner which, more
than irascibility, intimidated his younger neighbors. It was a part of
his courtesy, now, to begin far-off from the subject at hand, in an
effort, foredoomed to failure, to put his auditor at ease.
'I often watch you tall boys going past, and remind myself that I am
getting old. I can remember most of you in your carriages. Indeed, with
you, your father and I were law students together. And now you’re in
high school, your mother tells me.' And with hardly a shift of tone,
'She tells me, too,--or rather my wife does,--that you were unfortunate
enough to see Mr. Whiting on the day of poor Morgan’s death. I am
sorry--'
'I--didn’t see him do anything,' Robbins protested. His tongue was
suddenly thick and furry, and the words came with difficulty. 'Nothing I
could swear to. He was just--there.'
He was staring straight ahead; he could not see how shrewd were the
kindly eyes which measured him.
'Timid,' the lawyer was labeling his witness. 'Sensitive.
Over-scrupulous. He’d scruple his testimony out of existence.'
Aloud he spoke with grave reassurance. 'Your merely seeing Mr. Whiting
can do him no harm. Indeed, you may not be needed at all. The
preliminary examination having been waived--' He paused for a moment
before the Nelson gate, his thin-featured old face remote and serious.
'In any case, remember this, my boy. Nothing is ever required of you on
the witness stand except to tell your story exactly as you have told it
off the stand. In the end the truth will come out and no innocent man be
harmed.'
He congratulated himself as he went on up the street that he had
reassured the lad, put before him his irresponsibility in its true
light. Had he looked back, he might have seen the reassured witness
staring after him in a kind of horror of amazement. To Robbins it was as
if, astoundingly, an outsider had voiced the thought of his own heart.
That truth must prevail, that false witnesses would be brought to
confusion--it was a belief ingrained into the fibre of his being. He
was sick with a premonition of disgrace.
'Only, they can’t _know_,' he tried to hearten himself. 'I can stick to
it I did.' He stood still a moment, the line of his sensitive chin grown
suddenly hard. 'And I’ve got to stick to it,' he warned himself. 'I’ve
got to stick it out as long as I live.'
It did not need the county attorney’s advice to keep him away from the
court-room during the opening days of the trial. With all the youthful
masculinity of Sutro crowding the courthouse steps, Robbins sat at home
in the hot, darkened parlor, reading from books pulled down at random,
seeing always, no matter what he read, a room set thick with eyes--eyes
scornful, eyes reproachful, eyes speculative.
When at last the ordeal came, it was so much less dreadful than his
anticipation of it that he was conscious of an immediate relief. There
was, indeed, a minute of blind confusion as he made his way toward the
stand--voices singing in his ears, a blue mist before his eyes. Then,
somehow, he was sworn and seated, and all round him were the friendly
faces of neighbors. He could see the judge nod encouragement to him over
his desk; he could see the bracing kindness of the county attorney’s
glance. Whiting he could not see, the bowed shoulders of a reporter
intervening.
He was scarcely nervous after the first moments. His story flowed from
him without effort, almost without volition. 'I was walking along the
track--I’d been fishing--' It seemed to him that he had said the words a
million times.
There were interruptions now and then; objections; questions from a
round-faced, deep-voiced youngster, who, Robbins divined presently, was
Whiting’s lawyer; but all of it--the narrative, the pauses, the
replies--came with the regular, effortless movement of well-oiled
machinery. He could have laughed at the puerile efforts of the defense
to break down his story.--'Was he sure that he knew James Whiting?' Was
there a resident of Sutro who did not know him? 'Could he swear,--taking
thought that he was under oath,--could he _swear_ that the man on the
side of the car was James Whiting and not some other man resembling him?
If, on a moving train, another man resembling James Whiting, of about
James Whiting’s size--'
'He knows he can’t touch me,' Robbins was thinking triumphantly. 'He
knows it!'
The question of truth or falsehood was quite removed from him now. He
came down from the stand finely elated, and in the afternoon went back
of his own accord to the court-room. Emerson, the truck-gardener, was
under examination and faring badly. One by one, the damaging facts of
his past came out against him--an arrest for theft, a jail sentence for
vagrancy, a quarrel with the prisoner, proved threats. The victim
emerged limp from the ordeal, and slunk away from the room, wholly
discredited.
'Serves him right, though,' Robbins quenched his momentary pity. 'I knew
all the time he was lying.' He started suddenly, so violently that the
listener seated next him turned in irritation. 'And,' it had flashed
through his mind, 'and he knew I was!'
His eyes sought the prisoner--the man who also knew--where he sat
hunched heavily forward in his chair, his arms upon the table. For an
instant, pity, like some racking physical pain, shot through Robbins. To
be caught in such a web! To be caught through no fault of his own! It
was the first time the purely personal side had broken its way past his
own selfish concern. It stifled him and, forcing his eyes from the man’s
brooding face, he got up and stumbled out of the room.