On the day that Dorn Hackett's trial commenced, the little court-house
of Sag Harbor was by no means large enough to contain half the people
who came from all the country around to attend it. From the
neighborhood in which the murder had been committed, they seemed to
have come in a body. Old acquaintances, neighbors, friends of the
prisoner--who had known him since he was a child; who had heard as
fresh the news that his father, William Hackett, had been swept
overboard from a whaler's yard-arm and lost in a gale, and who had
seen the drowned man's little orphan boy grow up to young manhood
among them--were present by dozens; yet among them all one could
hardly hear a few faint expressions of sympathy for him, or hope for
the demonstration of his innocence. There is nothing for which
ignorant people, particularly rustics, are so ready as the acceptance
of the guilt of a person accused legally of a crime; nothing they
resent so deeply as what they believe to be an attempt to deceive them
by a false assumption of innocence. The discovery of the marked
handkerchief in his possession, had been, to their narrow minds,
conclusive evidence of Dorn's guilt and each man of them felt it an
insult to what he deemed his intelligence, that Dorn had, just before
that discovery, betrayed him into a temporary fear that they might not
have the right man after all.
Deacon Harkins, who, by the way, had tried to have Dorn, as a child,
indentured to him by the county overseer of the poor, as soon as he
heard of the drowning of the lad's father--a slavery from which the
boy was saved by the kindness of a good old man, long since dead--was
prominent in the crowd about the court-house, quoting texts and
vaunting the foresight with which he had "always looked forward to
seeing that young man come to a bad end." Aunt Thatcher, was of
course, present, and--as might have been expected--vindictively
exultant. Mary Wallace, having been summoned as a witness by the
prosecution, was compelled to attend, and made her way through the
throng to the county clerk's office, beneath the court-room, where she
was given a seat to wait until she should be called. Happily there was
still humanity enough among the rough people who were eagerly awaiting
the conviction of her lover, to prompt some little sympathetic feeling
for her; and, as she went by, they at least refrained from saying, in
her hearing, that they hoped Dorn Hackett would be hanged. Aunt
Thatcher was incapable of such delicacy and reserve. She had been
saying that daily, and almost hourly, since she had heard of his
arrest, and she continued to say it now, loudly too, until the
disgusted county clerk ordered her to keep quiet or get out of his
office, to which she had forced her way with Mary.
There was little difficulty in getting a jury, for in those days fewer
newspapers were read than now are; fewer people sought to escape jury
duty by deliberately "forming and expressing opinions relative to the
guilt or innocence of the accused" in advance of the trial; and, above
all, lawyers had not yet developed, as they since have, the science of
delay at that point of the proceedings. Twelve "good men and true"
were selected--perhaps a sample dozen as juries go. One of them heard
with great difficulty; two kept yawning and dropping asleep from time
to time; a fourth belied his looks, if he was not at least
semi-idiotic; three were manifestly weak, simple-minded persons,
devoid of moral force and easy to be influenced by a stronger will,
and the remaining five were evidently men who doubtless meant to do
right, but were obstinate to the verge of pig-headedness, and showed,
by the countenances with which they regarded the prisoner, that they
were already inimical to him. And before this "jury of his peers" Dorn
Hackett stood, to be tried for his life.
It would be time and space lost to recite the thrilling opening speech
of the prosecuting attorney; to tell how vividly he depicted the
horrors of the crime that had been perpetrated; how artfully he
seemed, by word and gesture, to connect the prisoner with the crime at
every stage of its progress; how scornfully he dwelt upon "the absurd
story by which the murderer had sought to explain away the damning
proofs against him, and which his counsel might have the audacity to
ask this intelligent jury to believe," etc. It was more like a closing
than an opening speech, and when it was ended, five of the jury looked
as if they were satisfied that the proper thing to do would be to take
the prisoner right out and hang him to one of the big elms beside the
court-house.
Mr. Dunn's heart sank within him. What had he to make headway with
against that speech, before those five men and with that fatal marked
handkerchief ever fluttering before his eyes?
The hearing of the witnesses for the State continued slowly all the
first day. All that had been sworn to before the committing
magistrate, was repeated now, and there was really very little more,
but that little was adroitly handled, and the temper of the jury was
to make the most of it. Peter Van Deust produced a great effect when
he gave his testimony as to the identification of the handkerchief
belonging to his murdered brother, which was, in the language of the
prosecutor, cunningly woven into questions "voluntarily, confidently,
and impudently exhibited by the prisoner to sustain his preposterous
story." Poor Mary Wallace had to go on the stand and testify that Dorn
had been with her, walking and conversing, in the edge of the woods,
less than half a mile from the Van Deust homestead, on the night of
the murder, and that he left her about nine o'clock. Witnesses were
brought from New Haven to testify to Dorn's arrival in that city, the
morning after the murder, with his clothes bloody, head cut, and one
ankle sprained; and to his admissions that he had received those
injuries while running through the woods on Long Island the night
before.
"Not," exclaimed the prosecuting-attorney, "as he would have it
believed, long before the murder, but when he was fleeing red-handed,
conscious that the brand of Cain was on his brow!"
The prisoner's counsel protested against this sort of interpolation of
comments, as irregular and unfair, and the court sustained him in that
view, but the majority of the jury looked as if they would have
thanked the prosecutor for expressing their sentiments so forcibly.
Then other witnesses were called to prove, as experts, that a man
would have time after the hour at which it was believed the murder was
committed,--say, at midnight--to run to the Napeague Inlet, take a
sail-boat and reach New Haven early the next morning. One, indeed,
testified that he had tried and accomplished the feat.
And that was all the State had to offer. Still, the popular feeling
was that it was sufficient.
"It would hardly amount to much before a city jury," said the
prosecuting-attorney, in confidential chat with some other lawyers at
the close of the day's proceedings, "but I guess it will be enough
down here."
The jury, at the adjournment of the court for the day, gravely heard
the injunction of the judge, that they "should refrain from talking to
anybody about the case," and then went out and discussed the evidence
with their friends and neighbors.
"The handkerchief must hang him; that's clear," said everybody. "How
could he have had it if he hadn't killed the old man?"
Dorn was remanded back to the jail, where Mary had a little interview
with him, during which she wept almost constantly, and he spent all
his time in trying to console her with loving words and foolish hopes,
so that neither of them said or did anything particularly reasonable
or worthy of the telling here. And then Mary went back to the room
that had been assigned her in the tavern, and cried so all night, that
in the morning her eyes were red and swollen almost sufficiently to
justify in some measure the gratified assurance of Aunt Thatcher, that
she "looked like a fright."
As for Lem Pawlett, it must be admitted that he acted in what seemed
to his friends a most reprehensible and unaccountable manner.
Following even too strictly the injunctions of Mr. Pelatiah Holden
about saying nothing to anybody, he would not even give them the
satisfaction of knowing positively that he had found his man, and
that the much needed evidence would be forthcoming in due time. He did
go so far, under Ruth's most severe pressure, as to assure her that it
would "be all right," but beyond that the little maiden found that for
once her power was set at naught. He felt resting upon him a
responsibility that temporarily out-weighted his love, and the gravity
of his stubborn silence awed the girl, and made her look upon him with
a new respect. But how he suffered! Bearing alone and in silence his
weighty secret, made him feel that virtually Dorn's salvation depended
upon him, and should anything happen by which that evidence would not
be forthcoming, and Dorn be hanged in consequence of its failure, he
would be neither more nor less than the executioner of his friend. The
next most unhappy man in the town that night, after the prisoner
himself, was Lem Pawlett. When, from sheer exhaustion, he fell asleep,
nearly at daylight, he had a horrid dream that he was tied hand and
foot, and powerless to speak, while his witness was fleeing swiftly
away from him on horseback, and that Dorn was standing before him,
under the gallows-tree, with a noose about his neck and a horrible
look of haunting reproach in his eyes. From that dream he awoke with a
howl of fright, and, fearing to go to sleep again, sprang up, dressed
himself and hurried out into the deserted main street of the still
slumbering town.
He took his way toward the wharf. "Sometimes," he said to himself,
"the packet from New York gets in early; hardly so early as this, but
then she might have had an extraordinary good breeze last night." His
road led him by the jail. He shuddered as he passed the grim, gray
building, for never before had it seemed to him so big, so strong, so
terrible. Not one living thing did he meet in his lonely walk, and
when he reached the wharf the most profound silence surrounded him.
The tide was rising, but without the sound of its accustomed swash on
the piles. Its influx was indicated only by a slight ripple around the
obstacles it met. As far out as he could see the surface of the bay
was as smooth as a mirror. Going down some slimy green steps to a
boat-landing, he dipped one hand into the water, and held it above his
head. There was not even a breath of air moving. With sullen
resignation he seated himself upon a pile of lumber and waited.
The dawn appeared, then suddenly the sun rose up behind the town,
casting upon the glassy surface of the water before him long shadows
of the tall warehouses, and of the people who now began to busy
themselves in the vicinity. Not the smallest ripple broke the outlines
of those shadows. He looked anxiously up at the sky. Ah! with what joy
he would have seen, in the direction of New York, a myriad of those
ragged fleecy clouds which sailors call "mare's tails," and believe to
be sure harbingers of wind. But there was not one to give him hope.
The sky looked like a monster dome of unflecked, burnished brass. It
was high tide, and a dead calm.
With a groan he turned away and retraced his steps to the tavern. An
unwonted excitement began to be perceptible in the streets, the
continuation of that of the preceding day. Already people were
flocking in from the country, determined to be nearest the court-room
doors when they were thrown open. The tavern bar-room was crowded,
even before the sleepy bar-keeper had his eyes well rubbed open, and a
sort of general picnic scene was presented by the people breakfasting
on cold lunches in the shade of the elms.