although many in the room were laughing, and she herself, I think, felt
she had done little but sacrifice her own character without repairing
the injury she had done black curly. Jenks made her repeat that she was
frightened; not calm enough to be sure of voices, especially many
speaking together; that she had seen no one throughout. He even
attempted to show that the talk about the hay-stack might have been
purely about hay, and that the half-sack of gold might have been put
there at another time--might belong to some honest man this very moment.
"Did you ever know the young man who boarded with you to do a
dishonorable thing?" inquired Jenks. "Did you not have the highest
opinion of him?"
She had not expected a question like this. It nearly broke the woman
down. She put her hand to her breast, and seemed afraid to trust her
voice. "I have the highest opinion of him," she said, word painfully
following word. "He--he used to know that."
"I have finished," said Jenks.
"Can I go?" asked the witness, and the attorneys bowed. She stood one
hesitating moment in the witness-stand, and she looked at the jury and
the court; then, as if almost in dread, she let her eyes travel to black
curly. But his eyes were sullenly averted. Then Mrs. Sproud slowly made
her way through the room, with one of the saddest faces I have ever
seen, and the door closed behind her.
We finished our case with all the prisoners identified, and some of them
doubly. The defence was scarcely more than a sham. The flimsy alibis
were destroyed even by the incompetent, unready Rocklin, and when the
charge came blackness fell upon the citizens of Tucson. The judge's cold
statements struck them as partisan, and they murmured and looked darkly
at him. But the jury, with its Meakums, wore no expression at all during
any of his remarks. Their eyes were upon him, but entirely fishlike. He
dismissed the cumbersome futilities one by one. "Now three witnesses
have between them recognized all the prisoners but one," he continued.
"That one, a reputed pauper, paid several hundred dollars of debts in
gold the morning after the robbery. The money is said to be the proceeds
of a cattle sale. No cattle have ever been known to belong to this man,
and the purchaser had never been known to have any income until this
trial began. The prisoner's name was on Mrs. Sproud's paper. The
statement of one witness that he sat on a stone and saw three other of
the prisoners firing has been contradicted by a woman who described
herself as having run away at once; it is supported by two men who are
admitted by all to have remained, and in consequence been shot. Their
statements have been assailed by no one. Their testimony stands on the
record unimpeached. They have identified five prisoners. If you believe
them--and remember that not a word they said has been questioned--" here
the judge emphasized more and more clearly. He concluded with the
various alternatives of fact according to which the jury must find its
several possible verdicts. When he had finished, the room sat sullen and
still, and the twelve went out. I am told that they remained ten minutes
away. It seemed one to me.
When they had resumed their seats I noticed the same fishlike oracular
eye in most of them unchanged. "Not guilty," said the foreman.
"What!" shouted the judge, startled out of all judicial propriety. "None
of 'em?"
"Not guilty," monotonously repeated the foreman.
We were silent amid the din of triumph now raised by Tucson. In the
laughter, the hand-shaking, the shouting, and the jubilant pistol-shots
that some particularly free spirit fired in the old Cathedral Square, we
went to our dinner; and not even Stirling could joke. "There's a certain
natural justice done here in spite of them," he said. "They are not one
cent richer for all their looted twenty-eight thousand. They come out
free, but penniless."
"How about Jenks and that jury?" said I. And Stirling shrugged his
shoulders.
But we had yet some crowning impudence to learn. Later, in the street,
the officers and I met the prisoners, their witnesses, and their counsel
emerging from a photographer's studio. The Territorial Delegate had been
taken in a group with his acquitted thieves. The Bishop had declined to
be in this souvenir.
"That's a picture I want," said I. "Only I'll be sorry to see your face
there," I added to black curly.
"Indeed!" put in Jenks.
"Yes," said I. "You and he do not belong in the same class. By-the-way,
Mr. Jenks, I suppose you'll return their horses and saddles now?"
Too many were listening for him to lose his temper, and he did a sharp
thing. He took this public opportunity for breaking some news to his
clients. "I had hoped to," he said; "that is, as many as were not needed
to defray necessary costs. But it's been an expensive suit, and I've
found myself obliged to sell them all. It's little enough to pay for
clearing your character, boys."
They saw through his perfidy to them, and that he had them checkmated.
Any protest from them would be a confession of their theft. Yet it
seemed an unsafe piece of villany in Jenks.
"They look disappointed," I remarked. "I shall value the picture very
highly."
"If that's Eastern sarcasm," said Jenks, "it's beyond me."
"No, Mr. Jenks," I answered. "In your presence sarcasm drops dead. I
think you'll prosper in politics."
But there I was wrong. There is some natural justice in these events,
though I wish there were more. The jury, it is true, soon seemed oddly
prosperous, as Stirling wrote me afterwards. They painted their houses;
two of them, who had generally walked before, now had wagons; and in so
many of their gardens and small ranches did the plants and fruits
increase that, as Stirling put it, they had evidently sowed their
dollars. But upon Jenks Territorial displeasure did descend. He had
stayed away too much from Washington. A pamphlet appeared with the
title, "What Luke Jenks Has Done for Arizona." Inside were twenty blank
pages, and he failed of re-election.
Furthermore, the government retaliated upon this district by abandoning
Camp Thomas and Lowell Barracks, those important sources of revenue for
the neighborhood. The brief boom did not help Tucson very long, and left
it poorer than ever.
At the station I saw Mrs. Sproud and black curly, neither speaking to
the other. It was plain that he had utterly done with her, and that she
was too proud even to look at him. She went West, and he as far east as
Willcox. Neither one have I ever seen again.
But I have the photograph, and I sometimes wonder what has happened to
black curly. Arizona is still a Territory; and when I think of the Gila
Valley and of the Boy Orator, I recall Bishop Meakum's remark about our
statesmen at Washington: "You can divide them birds in two lots--those
who know better, and those who don't. D'you follow me?"
THE END
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
intent.