THE TRIAL
Katherine's first thought, on leaving Bruce's office, was to lay her
discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her
new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they
could quickly discover wherein he had been duped--for she still held
him to be an unwitting tool--and thus quickly clear up the whole case.
But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning
that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him
out of her reach until the trial was over.
In sharpest disappointment, Katherine went home. With the trial so few
hours away, with all her new discoveries buzzing chaotically in her
head, she felt the need of advising with some one about the situation.
Bruce's offer of assistance recurred to her, and she found herself
analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked
away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet
at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man
with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply
marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some
dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very
sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his
rightness--courageous, unselfish, sincere--that was the way she now
saw the editor of the _Express_.
But he had sneered at her, sharply criticized her, and she hotly
spurned the thought of asking his aid. Instead of him, she that
evening summoned Old Hosie Hollingsworth to her house, and to the old
lawyer she told everything. Old Hosie was convinced that she was
right, and was astounded.
"And to think that the good folks of this town used to denounce me as
a worshipper of strange gods!" he ejaculated. "Gee, what'll they say
when they learn that the idol they've been wearing out their knee-caps
on has got clay feet that run clear up to his Adam's-apple!"
They decided that it would be a mistake for Katherine to try to use
her new theories and discoveries openly in defence of her father. She
had too little evidence, and any unsupported charges hurled against
Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling
back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared
not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had
incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course
seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her
to work up further evidence.
"Only," warned Hosie, "you must remember that the chances are that
Blake has already slipped the proper word to Judge Kellog, and
there'll be no postponement."
"Then I'll have to depend upon tangling up that Mr. Marcy on the
stand."
"And Doctor Sherman?"
"There'll be no chance of entangling him. He'll tell a straightforward
story. How could he tell any other? Don't you see how he's been
used?--been made spectator to a skilfully laid scheme which he
honestly believes to be a genuine case of bribery?"
At parting Old Hosie held her hand a moment.
"D'you remember the prophecy I made the day you took your office--that
you would raise the dickens in this old town?"
"Yes," said Katherine.
"Well, that's coming true--as sure as plug hats don't grow on fig
trees! Only not in the way I meant then. Not as a freak. But as a
lawyer."
"Thank you." She smiled and slowly shook her head. "But I'm afraid it
won't come true to-morrow."
"Of course a prophecy is no good, unless you do your best."
"Oh, I'm going to do my best," she assured him.
The next morning, on the long awaited day, Katherine set out for the
Court House, throbbing alternately with hope and fear of the outcome.
Mixed with these was a perturbation of a very different sort--an
ever-growing stage-fright. For this last there was good reason. Trials
were a form of recreation as popular in Calloway County as
gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and this trial--in the lack of
a sensational murder in the county during the year--was the greatest
of the twelvemonth. Moreover, it was given added interest by the fact
that, for the first time in recorded history, Calloway County was
going to see in action that weirdest product of whirling change, a
woman lawyer.
Hub to hub about the hitch-racks of the Square were jammed buggies,
surries, spring wagons and other country equipages. The court-room was
packed an hour before the trial, and in the corridor were craning,
straining, elbowing folk who had come too late. In the open
windows--the court-room was on the ground floor--were the busts of
eager citizens whose feet were pedestaled on boxes, the sale of which
had been a harvest of small coin to neighbouring grocers; and in the
trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and
strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who
usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and
argument--once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the
empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to
earth by the snoring of the bench--attested to the unusualness of the
occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called
the court to order, not with his usual masterpiece of mumbled
unintelligibility, brought to perfection by long years of practice,
but with real words that could have been understood had only the
audience been listening.
But their attention was all fixed upon the counsel for the defence.
Katherine, in a plain white shirt waist and a black sailor, sat at a
table alone with her father. Doctor West was painfully nervous; his
long fingers were constantly twisting among themselves. Katherine was
under an even greater strain. She realized with an intenser keenness
now that the moment for action was at hand, that this was her first
case, that her father's reputation, his happiness, perhaps even his
life, were at stake; and she was well aware that all this theatre of
people, whose eyes she felt burning into her back, regarded her as
the final curiosity of nature. Behind her, with young Harper at his
side, she had caught a glimpse of Arnold Bruce, eying her critically
and sceptically she thought; and in the audience she had glimpsed the
fixed, inscrutable face of Harrison Blake.
But she clung blindly to her determination, and as Bud White sat down,
she forced herself to rise. A deep hush spread through the court-room.
She stood trembling, swallowing, voiceless, a statue of stage-fright,
wildly hating herself for her impotence. For a dizzy, agonizing moment
she saw herself a miserable failure--saw the crowd laughing at her as
they filed out.
A youthful voice, from a balcony seat in an elm tree, floated in
through the open window:
"Speak your piece, little girl, or set down."
There was a titter. She stiffened.
"Your--your Honour," she stammered, "I move a postponement in order to
allow the defence more time to prepare its case."
Judge Kellog fingered his patriarchal beard. Katherine stood hardly
breathing while she waited his momentous words. But his answer was as
Old Hosie had predicted.
"In view of the fact that the defence has already had four months in
which to prepare its case," said he, "I shall have to deny the motion
and order the trial to proceed."
Katherine sat down. The hope of deferment was gone. There remained
only to fight.
A jury was quickly chosen; Katherine felt that her case would stand as
good a chance with any one selection of twelve men as with any other.
Kennedy then stepped forward. With an air that was a blend of his
pretentious--if rather raw-boned--dignity as a coming statesman, of
extreme deference toward Katherine's sex, and of the sense of his
personal belittlement in being pitted against such a legal weakling,
he outlined to the jury what he expected to prove. After which, he
called Mr. Marcy to the stand.
The agent of the filter company gave his evidence with that degree of
shame-facedness proper to the man, turned state's witness, who has
been an accomplice in the dishonourable proceedings he is relating. It
all sounded and looked so true--so very, very true!
When Katherine came to cross-examine him, she gazed at him steadily a
moment. She knew that he was lying, and she knew that he knew that she
knew he was lying. But he met her gaze with precisely the abashed,
guilty air appropriate to his role.
What she considered her greatest chance was now before her. Calling up
all her wits, she put to Mr. Marcy questions that held distant, hidden
traps. But when she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that
conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that
should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked
around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever
with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer--and always
elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute
stood looking silently at him in baffled exasperation.
"Have you any further questions to ask the witness?" old Judge Kellog
prompted her, with a gentle impatience.
For a moment, stung by this witness's defeat of her, she had an
impulse to turn about, point her finger at Blake in the audience, and
cry out the truth to the court-room and announce what was her real
line of defence. But she realized the uproar that would follow if she
dared attack Blake without evidence, and she controlled herself.
"That is all, Your Honour," she said.
Mr. Marcy was dismissed. The lean, frock-coated figure of Mr. Kennedy
arose.
"Doctor Sherman," he called.
Doctor Sherman seemed to experience some difficulty in making his way
up to the witness stand. When he faced about and sat down the
difficulty was explained to the crowd. He was plainly a sick man.
Whispers of sympathy ran about the court-room. Every one knew how he
had sacrificed a friend to his sense of civic duty, and everyone knew
what pain that act must have caused a man with such a high-strung
conscience.
With his hands tightly gripping the arms of his chair, his bright and
hollow eyes fastened upon the prosecutor, Doctor Sherman began in a
low voice to deliver his direct testimony. Katherine listened to him
rather mechanically at first, even with a twinge of sympathy for his
obvious distress.
But though her attention was centred here in the court-room, her brain
was subconsciously ranging swiftly over all the details of the case.
Far down in the depths of her mind the question was faintly suggesting
itself, if one witness is a guilty participant in the plot, then why
not possibly the other?--when she saw Doctor Sherman give a quick
glance in the direction where she knew sat Harrison Blake. That glance
brought the question surging up to the surface of her conscious mind,
and she sat bewildered, mentally gasping. She did not see how it could
be, she could not understand his motive--but in the sickly face of
Doctor Sherman, in his strained manner, she now read guilt.
Thrilling with an unexpected hope, Katherine rose and tried to keep
herself before the eyes of Doctor Sherman like an accusing conscience.
But he avoided her gaze, and told his story in every detail just as
when Doctor West had been first accused. When Kennedy turned him over
for cross-examination, Katherine walked up before him and looked him
straight in the eyes a full moment without speaking. He could no
longer avoid her gaze. In his eyes she read something that seemed to
her like mortal terror.
"Doctor Sherman," she said slowly, clearly, "is there nothing you
would like to add to your testimony?"
His words were a long time coming. Katherine's life hung suspended
while she waited his answer.
"Nothing," he said.
"There is no fact, no detail, that you may have omitted in your direct
testimony, that you now desire to supply?"
"Nothing."
She took a step nearer, bent on him a yet more searching gaze, and put
into her voice its all of conscience-stirring power.
"You wish to go on record then, before this court, before this
audience, before the God whom you have appealed to in your oath, as
having told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"
He averted his eyes and was silent a moment. For that moment Blake,
back in the audience, did not breathe. To the crowd it seemed that
Doctor Sherman was searching his mind for some possible trivial
omission. To Katherine it seemed that he was in the throes of a final
struggle.
"You wish thus to go on record?" she solemnly insisted.
He looked back at her.
"I do," he breathed.
She realized now how desperate was this man's determination, how
tightly his lips were locked. But she had picked up another thread of
this tangled skein, and that made her exult with a new hope. She went
spiritedly at the cross-examination of Doctor Sherman, striving to
break him down. So sharp, so rigid, so searching were her questions,
that there were murmurs in the audience against such treatment of a
sincere, high-minded man of God. But the swiftness and cleverness of
her attack availed her nothing. Doctor Sherman, nerved by last
evening's talk beside the river, made never a slip.
From the moment she reluctantly discharged him she felt that her
chance--her chance for that day, at least--was gone. But she was there
to fight to the end, and she put her only witness, her father, upon
the stand. His defence, that he was the victim of a misunderstanding,
was smiled at by the court-room--and smiled at with apparently good
reason, since Kennedy, in anticipation of the line of defense, had
introduced the check from the Acme Filter Company which Dr. West had
turned over to the hospital board, to prove that the donation from the
filter company had been in Dr. West's hands at the time he had
received the bribe from Mr. Marcy. Dr. West testified that the letter
containing this check had not been opened until many days after his
arrest, and Katharine took the stand and swore that it was she herself
who had opened the envelope. But even while she testified she saw that
she was not believed; and she had to admit within herself that her
father's story appeared absurdly implausible, compared to the
truth-visaged falsehoods of the prosecution.
But when the evidence was all in and the time for argument was come,
Katherine called up her every resource, she remembered that truth was
on her side, and she presented the case clearly and logically, and
ended with a strong and eloquent plea for her father. As she sat down,
there was a profound hush in the court-room.
Her father squeezed her hand. Tears stood in his eyes.
"Whatever happens," he whispered, "I'm proud of my daughter."
Kennedy's address was brief and perfunctory, for the case seemed too
easy to warrant his exertion. Still stimulated by the emotion aroused
by her own speech and the sense of the righteousness of her cause,
Katherine watched the jury go out with a fluttering hope. She still
clung to hope when, after a short absence, the jury filed back in. She
rose and held her breath while they took their seats.
"You have reached a verdict, gentlemen?" asked Judge Kellog.
"We have," answered the foreman.
"What is it?"
"We find the defendant guilty."
Doctor West let out a little moan, and his head fell forward into his
arms. Katherine bent over him and whispered a word of comfort into his
ear; then rose and made a motion for a new trial. Judge Kellog denied
the motion, and haltingly asked Doctor West to step forward to the
bar. Doctor West did so, and the two old men, who had been friends
since childhood, looked at each other for a space. Then in a husky
voice Judge Kellog pronounced sentence: One thousand dollars fine and
six months in the county jail.
It was a light sentence--but enough to blacken an honest name for
life, enough to break a sensitive heart like Doctor West's.
A little later Katherine, holding an arm of her father tightly within
her own, walked with him and fat, good-natured Sheriff Nichols over to
the old brick county jail. And yet a little later, erect, eyes
straight before her, she came down the jail steps and started
homeward.
As she was passing along the Square, immediately before her Harrison
Blake came out of his stairway and started across the sidewalk to his
waiting car. Discretion urged her to silence; but passion was the
stronger. She stepped squarely up before him and flashed him a blazing
look.
"Well--and so you think you've won!" she cried in a low voice.
His colour changed, but instantly he was master of himself.
"What, Katherine, you still persist in that absurd idea of yesterday."
"Oh, drop that pretence! We know each other too well for that!" She
moved nearer and, trembling from head to foot, her passionate defiance
burst all bounds. "You think you have won, don't you!" she hotly
cried. "Well, let me tell you that this affair is not merely a battle
that was to-day won and ended! It's a war--and I have just begun to
fight!"
And sweeping quickly past him, she walked on into Main Street and down
it through the staring crowds--very erect, a red spot in either cheek,
her eyes defiantly meeting every eye.