of all his theosophic outfit. Then he went down to the quarry and
announced that he was his own boss from that time on; and by way of a
sample demonstration he called up Arthur Penrhyn and knocked the
everlasting Ghoollah out of him. Then he came back to the house and
looked at the thermometer.
To this day, I never see champagne without thinking of drinking some.
[Illustration]
CUTWATER OF SENECA.
The story I am about to tell is hardly a story at all. Perhaps I had
better call it a report, and let it go at that, with a word of
explanation as to how I came to report it.
In 1884 a new state survey and a new re-districting act between them cut
off about one-quarter of a northern timber county close to the Canada
border, and delivered over the severed portion to its neighbor on the
southerly side, a thickly settled county with several large towns and
with important manufacturing interests. This division left the backwoods
county temporarily without a judiciary or a place of holding court. But
the act provided for the transfer of all pending cases to the courts of
the more fortunate county down below, and gave the backwoods District
Attorney the privilege of trying in the said courts such cases as might
arise in his own bailiwick during his term of office then current.
No such cases occurred, however, until the period stated by the act was
nearly at an end, when the District Attorney of the mutilated county
came down to Metropole, our County Seat, to try a murder case. As our
backwoods neighbors were a somewhat untrammelled, uncouth and
free-and-easy folk at their quietest, his coming naturally attracted
some curious interest, especially after it became known that he had come
into town sitting side by side with the prisoner in the smoking-car, and
discussing politics with him. His name was Judge Cutwater, and he was
generally spoken of as Cutwater of Seneca--perhaps because he had at
some time been a Judge in Seneca, New York; perhaps because there was no
comprehensible reason for so calling him, any more than there was
comprehensible reason for various and sundry other things about him.
[Illustration]
He was a man who might have been sixty or seventy or eighty. Indeed, he
might have been a hundred, and he may be now, for all I know. But he was
lean, wiry, agile, supple and full of eternal youth. He might have been
good-looking if he had cared to be, for he had a fine old-fashioned
eagle face, and a handsome, flowing gray moustache, the grace of which
was spoiled by a straggling thin wisp of chin whiskers, and a patch of
gray stubble on each cheek. And, of course, he chewed tobacco profusely
and diffusely, and in his long, grease-stained, shiny broadcloth coat,
his knee-bagged breeches, his big slouch hat, and his eye-glasses with
heavy black horn rims, suspended from his neck by a combination of black
ribbon and pink string, he looked what he was, as clearly as though he
had been labelled--the representative of the Majesty of the Law among a
backwoods people out of odds with fortune, desperate, disheartened, down
on their luck, and lost to self-respect.
He said he was a good Democrat, and I think he was. He saw the prisoner
locked up, bade him a kindly “Good night, Jim,” and ordered the jailer
to let him have all the whiskey he wanted. Then Judge Cutwater called on
his brother of the local bench, greeting him with a ceremonious and
stately dignity that absolutely awed the excellent old gentleman, and
dropping an enormous Latin quotation on him as he departed, just by way
of utterly flattening him out. After that he strolled over to the hotel,
grasped the landlord warmly by the hand, and in the space of half an
hour told him a string of stories of such startling novelty, humor and
unfitness for publication that, as the landlord enthusiastically
declared, the recent Drummers’ Convention could not be said to be “in
it” with the old man.
The next day the case of Jim Adsum for the murder of his mate in a
logging camp was called in court; and District Attorney Cutwater’s
trying of it was a circus that nearly drove old Judge Potter into an
apoplectic fit, and kept the whole court room in what both those eminent
jurists united--it was the only thing they _did_ unite in--in
characterizing as a disgraceful uproar.
[Illustration]
And yet, somehow, by four o’clock he had evidence enough in to convict
the prisoner; the defence had not a single exception worth the noting,
and was rattled as to its state of mind; and that weird old prosecutor,
who repeatedly spoke of the prisoner at the bar as “Jim,” and made no
secret of the fact that they had been bosom friends and companions in
the forest, had worked up a case that made the best lawyers in the room
stare at him with looks of puzzled surprise and amazed respect.
When he rose to sum up, he slowly and thoughtfully drew a tin
tobacco-box from his trousers’ pocket, opened it and deposited therein
his quid, after passing his right hand, with a rapid and skillful
motion, across his gray moustache. This feat he performed with a dignity
that at once fascinated and awed the beholder. Then he began:
“Your Honor _and_ Gentlemen of the Jury: It is a rare and a seldom
occurrence that a prosecuting official, sworn to exert his utmost
energies to further the execution of the law, is called upon to invoke
the awful vengeance of that law, and the retribution demanded by
outraged humanity, upon the head of one under whose blanket he has lain
within the cold hollows of the snow-clad woods; with whom he has shared
the meagre food of the pioneer; side by side with whom he has struggled
for his rights and his liberties, at the daily and hourly risk of his
life, with half-breed Injuns and with half-breeder Kanucks. Sech,
gentlemen, is the duty that lies before this servant of the Law to-day;
and sech, gentlemen, is the duty that will be done, without fear or
favor, without consideration of friendship or hallowed association; and
this man, Jim Adsum, knows it, knowing me, as well as he ever knew
anything in the fool life that is now drawing to a close.
“You have heard, Gentlemen of the Jury, the evidence that has been laid
before you on the part of the prosecution, and you have heard the
attempt made by the learned counsel for the defence to discredit that
evidence in his eloquent but frivolous opening on behalf of his
unfortunate client. I trust that you have given to the one the
appreciative attention which it deserves, and that you have let the
other slip, naked and shivering, into the boundless oblivion of your
utter contempt.
“What, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the circumstances of this case? We
learn by the testimony for the people that on the twenty-seventh of
November a party of seven men started off for the upper waters of the
Sagus River, some to join a lumber camp, and others, among them this
defendant, James Adsum, and his victim, Peter Biaux, a Frenchman, in the
pursuit of their usual vocation--which may be said to be hunting for
fur-skins, on general principles. This party of seven men is snowed up,
and goes into camp at the junction of Sagus and First Rivers, and for
eleven days remains thus snow-bound in that icy solitude, the only human
beings within hundreds of miles.
“There has been, Gentlemen of the Jury, as has been shown to you, an old
grudge between the prisoner at the bar and the deceased; a grudge of
many years standing. There is no use of going into the origin of that
grudge. Some says it was cards; some, business; some, drink; and I
personally know that it was a woman; but that makes no difference before
this present tribunal. Let it be enough that there was bad blood between
the men; that it broke forth, as two witnesses have told you, day
[Illustration]
after day, within the confines of that little camp crowded within its
snow-bound arena in the heart of the immeasurable solitudes of the
wintry forest. Again and again the other members of the party intervened
to make peace between them. At last, upon the eighth day of December,
matters come to a crisis, and a personal encounter ensued between the
two men, in the course of which the deceased, being a Frenchman, is
badly mauled, and Jim, here, being without his knife, through
carelessness, is correspondingly cut. The two are separated; and, for
fear of further mischief, the Frenchman is sent down the river to fish
through the ice, and the prisoner is kept in the camp. That night, by
order of the head of the party, he sleeps between two men. These two men
have told you their story--how one of them woke in the night at the
sound, as he thought, of a distant shot, and became aware that Adsum
was no longer at his side--how, reaching out his hand, he grasped
another hand, and taking it for the prisoner’s, was reassured and fell
asleep again--and how, weeks afterward, he first found out that that
hand was the hand of the man who had been detailed to sleep on the other
side of the prisoner. You have heard, gentlemen, how these two men awoke
in the morning to find Adsum lying between them, shaking and shivering
with a chill under his heavy blanket. You have heard of the long and
unsuccessful search for Peter Biaux, and of the accidental discovery of
his mangled body three months later, under the ice of the Sagus River,
at a point ten miles below the camp. You have heard how each of these
witnesses was haunted by a suspicion that he had unwittingly betrayed
the trust reposed in him, and how, at last, when they spoke together of
their watch on that fatal night, their suspicion flashed, illumined with
the fire of heaven’s truth, into a hijjus certainty.
“You have been told, gentlemen, that the case of the people rests upon
circumstantial evidence. It does, gentlemen; it does; and the
circumstances are all there. You have heard how when these two witnesses
exchanged notes, they came to one conclusion, and that is the conclusion
to which I shall bring your minds. The witness Duncan said to the
witness Atwood: ‘Jim done it!’ The witness Atwood replied to him: ‘Jim
done it!’ And I say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury: ‘Jim _done_ it!’ And
you done it, Jim; you know you did!
“And now, gentlemen, what sort of a man is this prisoner at the bar? We
must consider him for the purposes of this trial as two men--on the one
hand, as the brave, upright and courageous trapper which he has on
numberless occasions, to my personal knowledge, shown himself to be--and
I may say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, that I would not be here
talking to you now if he had not a-been on one or two occasions. And on
the other hand, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am going to show him to you as
the red-handed murderer I always told him he would be if he gave the
rein to his violent passions. Besides, the darn fool’s drunk half the
time.
[Illustration]
“You have been told, gentlemen, by the learned counsel for the defence,
that this crime was committed in a rough country, where deeds of
violence are so common that it is possible that this man may have died
by another hand, murdered by a totally different person, for totally
different causes and reasons, and under circumstances totally
unconnected with the circumstances set forth in this case. Gentlemen, it
_is_ a rough country--rough as the speech of its children, rough as
their food and fare, rough as the storms they face, and nigh as rough as
the whiskey they drink. But it is a country, gentlemen, where every man
knows his neighbor’s face and his neighbor’s heart, where the dangers
and privations of life draw men closer together than they are drawn in
great cities like this beautiful town of yours, which is honored by the
citizens I see sot before me in this jury box. In that great snow-clad
wilderness, on that bitter eighth of December, with the thermometer
thirty degrees below zero, I can assure you, gentlemen, that there was
no casual, accidental, extemporaneous murderer lilly-twiddling around
that chilly solitude, sauntering among twenty-foot snowdrifts for the
purpose of striking down a total stranger with nineteen distinct and
separate cuts, and then fading away into nothingness like the airy
fabric of a vision. And Jim doing nothing all that time? Gentlemen, the
contention of the counsel ain’t _sense_!
[Illustration]
“Gentlemen, I wish I could tell you that it was so. I wish I could tell
you so for Jim’s sake. I wish I could tell you so for your own sakes,
for on you is soon to rest the awful yet proud responsibility of
deciding that a fellow human being’s life is forfeit to his
blood-guiltiness. I wish I could tell you so for my own sake, regarding
myself as a friend of Jim’s. But it is the District Attorney, the
Prosecutor for the People, that you must listen to while he tells you
the story of what happened that night.
“It was half-past eleven of that night when this man Adsum arose. How do
I know? Look in the almanac and see where the moon stood at half-past
eleven! It was then that he slipped from between his two guards and drew
back to where the flickering camp-fire cast the shadow of a pine tree on
the wall of snow that shut in their little resting-place. There he stood
in that shadow--a shadow that laid on his soul and on his face--and
waited to see if one of his comrades stirred. At his feet lay the two
men that had been set to guard him, Jared Duncan and Bill Atwood. Eb
Spence laid over the way with his feet to the fire. By him laid Sol
Geary and Kentucky Wilson. Why, Jim, I can see it all just as if I was
there! And then you--he--then, Gentlemen of the Jury, this prisoner at
the bar, slipped from that camp where his companions lay, bound to him
as he was bound to them, in the faith of comradeship; and, as he left
that little circle, that spot trodden out of the virgin snow, he left
behind him his fidelity, his self-respect and his manhood; his mind and
soul and heart full of the black and devilish thought of taking by
treacherous surprise the life of a comrade. Up
[Illustration]
to that hour, his spirit had harbored no sech evil thought. The men he
had theretofore killed--and I am not saying, gentlemen, that he had not
killed enough--had been killed in fair and open fight, and there is not
a one of them all but will be glad and proud to meet him as gentleman to
gentleman at the Judgement Day. But now it was with _murder_ in his
heart--base, cowardly, faithless murder--that he left that camp; it was
with murder in his heart that he sneaked, crouching low, down where the
heavy shadows hid the margin of the ice-bound stream. It was with murder
in his heart that he laid himself flat upon his belly on the ice when he
came within two rod of the Beaver Dam, and worked along, keeping ever
in the shadow till he come down to where that Frenchman, who, six hours
before, had et out of the same pan with him, stood with his light by his
side, gazing down into the black hole in the ice that was to be the
mouth of his grave and the portal of his entrance into eternity. Murder,
gentlemen, murder nerved his arm when he struck out that light with the
fur cap you see now in his hand; and murder’s self filled him with a
maniac’s rage as he rose to his feet and shot and stabbed the
defenceless back of his unsuspecting comrade. This, gentlemen, this--and
no tale of a prowling stranger--this, gentlemen, is the _truth_; and I
will appeal to the prisoner, himself, gentlemen, to bear me out. Jim
Adsum, you can lie to this Judge and you can lie to this Jury; you can
lie to your neighbors and you can lie to your own conscience; but you
can’t lie to old man Cutwater, and you know it. Now, Jim, was not that
just about the way you done it?”
And Jim nodded his head, turned the fur cap over in his hands, and
assented quietly:
“Just about.”
Twenty-five minutes later the Jury went out, and Judge Cutwater stalked
slowly and thoughtfully over to the prisoner, and touched him on the
shoulder.
“Jim,” he said, meditatively, “if I know anything about juries, and I
think I do, I’ve hanged you on that talk as sure as guns. Your man’s
summing-up didn’t amount to pea-soup. I’m sorry, of course; but there
wasn’t no way out of it for either you or me. However, I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. My term as District Attorney expires to-morrow at twelve;
and, if you’ll send that fool counsel of yours round to me at the
tahvern, I’ll show him how to drive a horse and cart through the law in
this case and get you a new trial, like rolling off a log.”
[Illustration]
And as Mr. Adsum got not only one but three new trials during the time
that I kept track of him, I have every reason to believe that Judge
Cutwater of Seneca kept his promise as a man, as faithfully as he
performed his duty as a prosecutor for the people.
MR. WICK’S AUNT.
The Wick family had run the usual course of families for many, many
years, and was quite old and respectable when causes, natural and
extraordinary, none of them being pertinent to this statement, reduced
said family to three members, viz:
MISS ANGELICA SUDBURY WICK, of the Boston branch of the family, who
lived in the house of her guardian, old Jonas Thatcher, with whom we
have no further concern, and who is therefore to be considered as turned
down, although in his day he was a highly respected leather merchant.
MISS ANGELICA WICK was fair and sweet and good up to the last
requirement of young womanhood.
MR. WINKELMAN HEMPSTEAD WICK, of the Long Island branch of the family, a
distant cousin of the young lady, and a young man of conscientious mind,
an accountant by profession, and very nearly ready to buy out his
employer.
MR. AARON BUSHWICK WICK, also of the Long Island branch of the family,
the grand-uncle of young Winkelman, who had brought up the young man in
his own house, and who loved him more than anything else in the world,
until, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, he fell in love with, and
married a lady named Louisa Nasmyth Pine, whom we will dismiss from
consideration as we dismissed the old leather merchant, although she was
a most estimable and attractive lady, and did fancy embroidery extremely
well. Her only concern with this story is that she bore the elder Mr.
Wick a baby, and died three or four months subsequently. But that was
enough; plenty; as much as was necessary.
The way that marriage came about was this: old Mr. Wick wanted to see
the Wick family perpetuated, but young Mr. Wick was one of those
cautious, careful, particular men who get to be old bachelors before
they know it. No girl whom he knew was quite exactly what he wanted. If
she had been, she would have been too good for any man on earth. In
fact, it took young Mr. Wick a number of years to realize that any way
he could marry, he could only marry a human being like himself. In the
meanwhile his grand-uncle grew impatient; and finally he said that if
Winkelman didn’t fix on a girl and get her to agree to marry him by the
first of next January, he, Aaron Bushwick Wick, would marry somebody
himself. Miss Louisa Nasmyth Pine, being then close on to forty, helped
him to get under the line just in time to save his grand-nephew from
engaging himself to an ill-tempered widow with five children--which is
the kind of woman that those particular men generally pick up in the
end. And it serves them right.
And so this marriage brought into existence the baby--BEATRICE BRIGHTON
WICK.
Old Mr. Wick’s endeavors to hand the name of Wick down to posterity were
crowned, as you see, with only partial success. He had a Wick, it was
true, but it was a Wick that would be put out by marriage. He found
himself obliged to fall back on young Winkelman, and he bethought
himself of the distant cousin in Boston. He knew nothing of her, but he
reasoned that if she were a Wick, she must be everything that was lovely
and desirable; and so he said to his grand-nephew:
[Illustration]
“Wink, you know that I am a man of my word. If you will go and marry
that girl, and if the two of you will take care of that confounded baby,
who is crying again, while I put in three or four years in Europe till
it gets to some sort of a rational age, I will buy your employer out,
guarantee you what is necessary for you to live on in some healthy
country place--no city air for that child, do you understand!--and when
I die you’ll be her guardian and have the usufruct of her estate and be
residuary legatee and all that sort of thing.”
Winkelman Wick knew that his grand-uncle was a man of his word, and that
“all that sort of thing” meant a very, very comfortable sort of thing,
for the old gentleman was rich and had liberal ideas, and drank more
port than was good for him. He had no fancy for marrying a strange
girl, but he thought there could be no harm in going out to Boston and
taking a look at his, so far, distant cousin. Under pretense of wanting
to write up the Wick genealogy, he went to Boston, and passed some time
under Mr. Thatcher’s hospitable roof. He found Angelica Wick all that
his fancy might have painted her but hadn’t; and, as Mr. Thatcher had
six daughters of his own, all of them older than Angelica, and none so
good-looking, he did not find any difficulty in inducing his pretty
cousin to marry him--and she did not back out even when he sprung the
baby contract on her. She said that she was a true woman and that she
would stand by him, but that she thought it might be a little awkward.
Feminine intuition is a wonderful thing. When it is right, it is apt to
be right.
[Illustration]
The elder Mr. Wick was as good as his word,--only, as is often the case
with people who pride themselves upon being as good as their word, he
took his own word too seriously. He died of apoplexy shortly after
landing at Liverpool. His will, however, was probated in New York, and
thus escaped a legacy tax. The will fully carried out every promise he
had made to his young kinsman, but he had drawn it to follow absolutely
the terms of his proposition. He had never for an instant contemplated
the possibility of his dying before he wanted to--people who make their
wills very rarely do--and he had so drawn the document that Mr. and Mrs.
Winkelman Wick could come into their inheritance only after carrying out
their part of the contract, which was to take care of their aunt, baby
Beatrice Brighton Wick, for the space of four years, during which Mr.
Aaron Bushwick Wick had intended, without consideration of the designs
of Divine Providence, to sojourn in Europe.
This brings the situation exactly down to bed-rock. On the tenth of
April, eighteen hundred and tumty-tum, Mr. Winkelman Wick and Miss
Angelica Wick were married in the old Wick house on Montague Street,
Brooklyn. On the twenty-fifth of April Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick ended his
journey across the Atlantic at the Port of Liverpool, England. On the
twenty-seventh of April he started on that other journey for which your
heirs pay your passage money--and he certainly was not happy in his
starting place. On the twenty-eighth of the same month young Mr. and
Mrs. Wick knew the terms of their grand-uncle’s will; and on the
thirtieth the old Wick mansion was in the hands of the trustees, and the
young Wicks were in a hotel in charge of their baby-aunt, Beatrice, who
was herself in charge of an aged Irishwoman, whose feet were decidedly
more intelligent than her brain. That is one of the beauties of
Ireland. You can get every variety of human being there from a cherub to
a chimpanzee.
[Illustration]
They were very comfortable in the hotel, and would have liked to stay
there, but that awful contract had as many ways of making itself
disagreeable as an octopus has. They had pledged themselves, with and
for the benefit of the baby, to provide a suitable place in the country
without unreasonable delay. Their lawyer informed them that reasonable
delay meant three weeks and not one day more. As their contract began on
the tenth of April, they had, therefore, one day left to them to carry
out this provision. Moreover, the contract, after defining the phrase “a
suitable country place” in terms that would have fitted a selling
advertisement of the Garden of Eden, went on to specify that no place
should be considered suitable that was not at least forty miles from any
city of twenty thousand inhabitants, or upward. When Mr. Aaron Bushwick
Wick wanted pure country air for a baby, he wanted it _pure_. If he
could, he would probably have had it brought in sealed bottles.