She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color
so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native
crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the
granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the
black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.
Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the
smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a
glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double
charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the
mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such
a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a
feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was
fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at
his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the
more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life,
the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity
himself.
But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the
two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked
on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and
the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for
his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him
unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.
"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and
beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height,
displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular
development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of
his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but
once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet
deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been
taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast
over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head,
and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much
ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed
door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark
mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son
seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks.
From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day--for how
could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about
the heifer?--Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.
August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her
procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months.
Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her
son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had
carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half
dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts
that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served
six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his
mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed
a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties
that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac
naïvely considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.
At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty
years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school
teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was
written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:
"_In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet
young, he began to seek after the God of David his father_.--
2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."
"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the
inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is
the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more
on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any
accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he
was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it,
neither."
Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and
to board him in the cheapest way for several days.
"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height,
"no one can!"
It is just such country lads as this--strong, self-reliant,
religious--who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite
mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other,
by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.
Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation
came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of
unuttered misery.
But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in
his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down
amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the
last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and
doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby
disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor
had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.
[Illustration: "MOVE ON, WILL YER!"]
"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his
silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy
upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly
reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance,
and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand
gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.
"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved
the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"
She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his
father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped
that they might clasp about his neck.
"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong.
Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an
honest man, an' a pious woman, and"--dropping with great solemnity
into scriptural language--"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your
godly name."
With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their
sons into the whirlwind of the world.
Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears
streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her,
and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But
his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.
"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good
boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man,
moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.
Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The
impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the
pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.
They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken,
helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the
parlor window. If he had known--a doubt crossed his brain, but the
girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they
ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting,
breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they
hid behind an oak tree and clasped.
* * * * *
It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted
terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it
until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters.
He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics
greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked
from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet
his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz
of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic
inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a
city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and
his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of
acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull"
or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of
the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he
had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be
swerved.
To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a
righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the
most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience--and
how else should he? This was his syllogism:
A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.
This man before me is a policeman.
Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to
him for advice.
The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise--and laughed
at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a
"billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy
has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.
It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a
mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the
guardian of the peace confidently.
This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had
emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity.
The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet
were in his air.
"Excuse me, sir--I want to ask you--" began Isaac, after a proper
obeisance.
"Move on, will yer!"
"But I wanted to ask you--"
"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"
"I want you to help me!"
"The ---- you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if
ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye
to the lock-up--so help me--!"
Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with
one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal
possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up
the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his
ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that
poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover
the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a
week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the
protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed
with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he
not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness
of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector
was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had
received half annihilated his intelligence.
[Illustration: "AM--I--IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR? IS
THIS YOUR LAW?"]
Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than
the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why
did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the
terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or
the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no
part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him.
It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid
rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than
barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror--not of cowardice, but of
friendlessness--seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might
possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on.
He had passed through the main street--or across it--he did not
know--until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks
had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms
had been exchanged for vulgar saloons--until--
Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud
cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man
dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms.
With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down
the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer.
By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the
building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac
caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the
pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding
a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the
situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports.
These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness
upon the heels of lightning.
Isaac's eyes were now strained upon the creature who was shot. He saw
the man stagger, throw up his hands, and fall. He heard a groan. At
that time the murderer with the smoking revolver was not more than ten
paces away. As he fired, he had stopped. When he saw his victim fall,
he gave a hoarse laugh.
By this time the lights in the saloon were put out, and its occupants
had fled. The rustle of human buzzards flocking to the tragedy had
begun. A motion that the murderer made to escape aroused the New
Hampshire boy to a fierce sense of justice. A few bounds brought him
by the side of the ruffian, who looked upon him with astonishment, and
then with inflamed fear. Isaac furiously struck the pointed pistol to
the pavement, and grasped the fellow's waist. Then he knew that he had
almost met his match. Isaac held his opponent's left arm by the wrist,
and tightened the vise. The murderer held the boy around his neck with
a contracting grip such as only a prize-fighter understands. Neither
spoke a word. It was power--power against skill.
There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that
the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called:
"Police! Police!"
The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then,
before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange
thing happen to his wrists.
* * * * *
The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are
different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt
stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades,
is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity
and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or
gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner,
with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means
to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between
rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a
sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know
better.
The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he
listened to the officer's story.
"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.
Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first
time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural
expression of trust returned to his face.
"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It
was dark--and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from
his cheeks. "Can I go now?"
Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would
have known that the young man before him could no more have committed
a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed
him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.
"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most
fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.
"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there?
Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water,
first."
"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk
who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts
terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that
red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent
to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant
refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of
an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation
of a wounded beast. The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his
mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them. It is only
fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for
prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am
relating came to pass.
Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.
"I have done nothing to be arrested for," he ended, looking at the
superintendent with his round, honest eyes. "I only did my duty as
anybody else would. Now let me go. Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can
get a decent night's lodging, for I am going home to-morrow. I've had
enough of this city. I want to go home!"
Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came
to this pathetic end. Every man in the station, from the most hardened
observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved. Isaac
himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the
prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants
can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been
cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest
people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned
again.
The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts)
busied themselves with bringing him to. From an opposite bench the
murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed
him. There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in
a body of iron. He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from
physical weakness, but because of mental anguish. Such an apparent
disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the
saloon-keeper's experience before.
"He is the only witness, you say, officer?" inquired the chief. "Are
you sure?"
"Yes, sorr!"
"We'll have to hold him, then. It's a great pity. I don't suppose he
could get a ten-dollar bail." The superintendent shook his gray head
thoughtfully. His subordinates did the same, with an exaggerated air
of distress.
"Where am I? Oh!" What horror in that exhalation, as Isaac realized
the place he was in! He staggered to his feet.
"Give me my bag, quick!" he exclaimed. "I will go."
"I'm afraid you can't go yet." The superintendent spoke as if he hated
to do his duty.
"Not go? Why not? You have no right to hold an innocent man!"
"In cases of assault and murder, the witnesses must be held until they
can furnish bail. That is the law." The white-haired man hurried his
explanation, as if he were ashamed of it.
"I will come back."
The officer shook his head.
"I give you my word I will." Isaac clasped the rail pleadingly.
"I'll have to lock you up to-night; the judge will settle the amount
of your bail to-morrow."
"Lock me up? I tell you I have no friends here! How can I get bail?
Where will you put me?"
"Show him his cell," replied the chief to his sergeant.
"Come along," said the policeman kindly. "All witnesses are treated
that way. We'll give you the most comfortable quarters we've got."
He took Isaac by the arm after the professional manner. The young
man flung off the touch. For an instant his eyes swept the station
menacingly. What if he should exert his strength! There were
two--three--four officers in the room. He might even overpower these,
and dash for liberty. He saw the livid reflection of electric lights
through the windows. Unconsciously he contracted his sinews, and
tightened his muscles until they were rigid. Then the hopelessness of
his position burst upon him like a red strontian fire. He felt blasted
by his disgrace.
"What are you doing to me?" he cried out. "Put me in prison? My God!
This will kill my mother!"
The next morning at ten o'clock Tom Muldoon was released on ten
thousand dollars bail. The surety was promptly furnished by the
alderman of the--th Ward. Muldoon was to present himself before the
grand jury, which met the first Monday in each month. As this was the
beginning of the month, his appearance could not be required for three
weeks at least, and by mutual agreement of the district attorney and
the counsel for the defendant, action might be put off for one or even
for two months more, pending the recovery or eventual death of the
assaulted. This would give the saloon-keeper plenty of time for the
two ribs that Isaac Masters had crushed, to mend!
There are sensitive men and women who would go insane after spending
an innocent night in a cell. In the dryest, the largest, the best of
them there is everything to debase the manhood and nauseate the soul.
The tin cup on the grated window-sill, half-filled with soup which the
last occupant left; the cot to the right of the hopeless door, made
of two boards and one straw mattress; and that necessity which is the
nameless horror of such a narrow incarceration--that which suffocates
and poisons; then the flickering jet up the concrete corridor, casting
such fitful shadows by the prisoner's side that he starts from his cot
in terror to touch the phantoms lest they be real; the alternate waves
of choking heat and harrowing cold; the hammering of the steam-pipes;
the curses, the groans, and the eruptive breathing of the sleeping
and the drunken; the thoughts of home, and friends, and irreparable
disgrace; the feeble hope that, after all, the family will not hear
of this so far away; and the despair because they will--mad visions
of suicide; blasphemy, repentant tears and prayers, each chasing the
other amid the persistent thought that all things are impotent but
freedom. Oh, what a night! What a night!
There are souls that have existed five, ten years under the courtine
of Catharine in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress--drugged, tortured, at
last killed like rats in a hole. All the while the maledict banner
of the Romanoffs writhes above them. What has been the power to keep
alive thousands of prisoners in those bastions, beyond the natural
endurance of the flesh? The glory of principle.
No wonder that a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps
followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning;
for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's
courage. It is easy to die for right, but not for wrong.
There were three short flights of iron that led past tiers of cells,
through the tombs, into the prisoner's dock. Isaac dully remembered
the huge coils of steam-pipe that curled up the side of the wall. He
thought of pythons. As he passed by, the prisoners awaiting sentence
held the rods of their doors in their hands, like monkeys, and swore,
and laughed, and shot questions at the keeper as he passed along.
"Have you no friends in the city?" proceeded the judge, after he had
examined the witness.
Isaac shook his head disconsolately. "I have about five dollars; that
is all, and my bag--and, sir, my character."
"Then I am afraid I shall have to hold you over in default of bail
until the trial." The judge nodded to the sheriff to bring on the next
case.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To the City Jail," answered the sheriff curtly. "Come along!" With a
mighty effort Isaac wrenched himself loose, and strode to the bar.
"Judge!" he cried. "Judge, you wouldn't do that! Let me go! I will
come back on the trial. Look at me, Judge! What have I done? Why
should I be sent to prison? I am an honest man!"
But the judge was used to such scenes, and he turned his head wearily
away.
"The law requires the government to hold the witness in default of
bail, in cases of capital crime." The judge was a kind man, and he
tried to do a kind act by explaining the subtle process of the law
again to the lad. When he had done this, he nodded. And now the men
approached Isaac to remove him, by force if necessary. But the New
Hampshire boy stood before the bar of justice stolidly. His eyes
wandered aimlessly, and his lips muttered. Paralysis swept near him at
that instant.
"Am--I--imprisoned because I am friendless and poor? Is this your
law?"
The judge shrugged his shoulders, but many in the court-room felt
uncomfortable.
"Then," spoke Isaac Masters, rising to his greatest height, and
uplifting his hand as if to call God to witness, "if this is law--damn
your law!" It was his first and last oath. Every man in the room
started to his feet at the utterance of that supreme legal blasphemy.
But the judge was silent. What sentence might he not inflict for such
contempt of court? What sentence could he? The witness had no money,
wherewith to be fined, and he was going to prison at any rate. The
judge was great enough to put himself in Isaac's place. He stroked his
beard meditatively.
"Remove the witness," he said. This was sentence enough. Although
two officers advanced cautiously, as if prepared for a tussle, a babe
might have led the giant unto the confines of Hades by the pressure of
its little finger. For Isaac wept.
[Illustration: "OH, MY GOD!" HE SOBBED. "MY GOD! MY GOD!"]
* * * * *
There were two other witnesses in the white-washed cell to which Isaac
was assigned. It was on the south side, and large, and sunny, and
often the door was left unlocked; but the cell looked out into a
crumbling grave-yard. One of these witnesses was a boy of about
eighteen, pale to the suggestion of a mortal disease. It did not
take Isaac long to find out that this complexion did not indicate
consumption, but was only prison pallor. The other prisoner was less
pathetic as to color, but he was listless and discouraged. The only
amusement of these men consisted in chewing tobacco in enormous
quantities, playing surreptitious games of high-low-jack, in reading
the daily paper, a single magazine, and waiting for the sun to enter
the barred window, and watching it in the afternoon as it slipped
away. These two men tried to cheer the new comer in a rude, hearty
way; but when the country lad learned that they had been in detention
for six months already, held by the government as main witnesses
against the first mate of their brig, their words were as dust. They
only choked him.
"What did you do," Isaac asked, "to get you in such a scrape?"
"We saw the mate shoot the cook; that's all."
"If I'd known," said the pale boy, with, a look out of the window,
"how Uncle Sam keeps us so long--I wished I hadn't said nothing. But
we get a dollar a day; that's something." And with a sigh that he
meant to engulf with his philosophy, the boy turned his face away, so
that Isaac should not suspect the tears that salted the flavor of the
coarse tobacco.
The dark outlook, the blind future, the hopeless cell, the disordered
table, the lazy life that deadened all activity but that of the
imagination, the lack of vigorous air, the lounging companionship,
but, above all things, the thought of his mother and Abbie, and the
brooding over what he dared to call an outrage perpetrated, in the
name of the law, upon himself--these things made a turmoil of Isaac's
brain. There was a daily conflict between the Christian and the
criminal way of looking at his irreparable misfortune which he was
surprised to find that even the possession of his father's Bible could
not control.
There were times when it needed all his intelligence to keep him from
springing on the keeper, and running amuck in the ward-room, simply
for the sake of uttering a violent, brutal protest. Then there were
hours when he was too exhausted to leave his cot. At such a time he
wrote a letter, his first letter to his mother, and he made the keeper
promise to have it mailed so that no one could possibly suspect that
it started from a prison.
"DEAR MOTHER"--it ran--"I have not written to you for three
weeks since I have been here, because I have been sick. I am
now in a very safe place, and am doing pretty well. I clear my
food and board and seventy-five cents a day. I have not been
paid yet. I think you had better not write to me until I can
give you a permanent address. I read my Bible every day and
love you more dearly than ever. I have tried to do my duty as
you would have me. Give my love to Abbie. I will write soon
again.
"Ever your affectionate son,
"ISAAC."
The simpleton! Could he not suspect that country papers copy from city
columns all that is of special local interest, and more? And did he
not know that it is one of the disgraces of modern journalism that no
department is so copiously edited, annotated, and illustrated as that
of criminal intelligence?
Could he not surmise that on the Saturday following his incarceration
the very mountains rang with the news? That it should be mangled
and turned topsy-turvy, and that in the eyes of his simple-minded
neighbors he should be thought of as the murderer, by reason of
his great strength? For how could it come into the intelligence of
law-abiding citizens and law-respecting people, that a man should be
shut up in prison, no matter what the newspapers said, unless he had
_done_ something to deserve it? What did the mountaineers know about
the laws of bail, and habeas corpus? And could such news, gossiped by
one neighbor, repeated by another, confirmed by a third, fail to reach
the desolate farm-house in which a woman, feeble, old and faint of
heart, lay trembling between life and death?
The grand jury meets on the first Monday of each month to indict those
for trial against whom reasonable proofs of guilt are obtained. The
saloon loafer had been shot in the groin, and pending his injuries
indictment was waived. In proportion as the wound proved serious and
the recovery prolonged, trial was postponed.
Isaac Masters had now been locked up six weeks. He had not yet heard
from home, and had only written once. About noon, one day, the keeper
came to tell him that a woman wished to see him. Isaac thought that
it was his mother, and the shame of meeting her in the guard-room
surrounded by tiers upon tiers of murderers and thieves and petty
criminals overcame him. The man of strength sat down on his cot, and
putting his hands over his white face, trembled violently. The guard,
who knew that Isaac was an innocent man, spoke to him kindly.
"Go! go!" said the prisoner in a voice of agony, "and tell my mother
that I will be right there."
"Mother!" ejaculated the guard. "She's the youngest mother for a man
of your size I ever see." He winked at the sailor, and went.
Then Isaac knew that it was Abbie, who had come alone, and he
tightened his teeth and lips together, and went down.
Isaac slowly came down the perforated iron stairs that were attached
to his prison wing like an inside fire-escape. On the bench in the
middle of the guard-room sat Abbie--a little, helpless thing she
seemed to him--facing the entrance, as if she feared to remove her
eyes from the door that led to freedom.
Abbie was greatly changed. She was dressed in black. If Isaac had been
a free man, this fact would have startled him. As it was, he was so
spent with suffering that his dulled mind could not understand it.
At first Abbie did not recognize her hearty lover. His huge frame was
gaunt and wasted. His ruddy face was white, and his cheeks hung
in folds like moulded putty. His country clothes dropped about him
aimlessly. From crown to foot he had been devastated by unmerited
disgrace. Grief may glorify; but the other ravages.
This meeting between the lovers was singularly undramatic. Each shrank
a little from the other. They shook hands quietly. His was burning;
her's like a swamp in October dew. He sat down beside her on the bench
awkwardly, while the deputy looked at them with careless curiosity. He
was used to nothing but tragedy and crime, and to his experienced mind
the two had become long ago confused.
"Mother?" asked Isaac, nervously moving his feet. "Didn't she get my
letter?"
The girl nodded gravely, tried to meet his eyes, and then looked away.
Tears fell unresisted down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe
them off. It was as if she were too well acquainted with them to check
their flow.
Then the truth began to filter through Isaac's bewebbed intellect. He
spread his knees apart, rested his arms upon them, and bent his head
to his hands. His great figure shook.
"Oh, my God!" he sobbed. "My God! My God!"
"Oh, don't, Isaac, don't!" Abbie put her hand upon his head as if he
had been her boy. "Your mother was as happy as could be. She was happy
to die. We buried her yesterday!"
How could she tell him that his mother had died of grief--too sorely
smitten to bear it--for his sake?
But Isaac's head rose and fell--rose and fell rhythmically between his
hands. His breath came in low groans, like that of an animal smitten
dead by a criminally heavy load.
"She sent her love before she passed away. She wanted you to come back
to the farm as soon as you could. She believed in you, Ikey, even if
you were in prison. She said Paul was in prison, and that it was a
terrible mistake. She knew your father's son would not depart from his
God!"
As Abbie uttered this simple confession of country faith, the
pitiful man lifted up his eyes from the tiled floor and looked at her
gratefully. His dry lips moved, and he tried to speak.
"Yes," was all he said, with fierce humility. Then the lack of breath
choked him.
"She made me promise not to give you up, and to come and see you. Of
course you are innocent, Ikey?" Abbie did not look at him.
"Yes," he answered mechanically.
"I know," she said softly.
Of what use were more words? They would only beat like waves against
the granite of his broken heart. The two sat silent for a time. Then
Abbie said, "I must go." She edged a little towards him, and touched
his coat.
"When will you come out? I will explain it all to the minister and the
neighbors. We will be married as soon as you come home. She wanted us
to! Oh, Ikey! Oh, Ikey! My poor--poor boy!"
Isaac arose unsteadily. It was time for her to go, for the turnkey had
nodded to him.
A fierce, mad indignation at his fate and what it had wrought upon his
mother and upon his honorable name blinded him. He did not even say
good-by, but left the girl standing in the middle of the guard-room
alone. At any cost he must get back to his cell. Supposing his mind
should give way before he got there? He staggered to the stairway. He
threw his hands up, and groped on the railing. A blindness struck him
before he had mounted two steps. He did not hear a woman's shriek, nor
the rushing of feet, nor the sound of his own fall.
When he awaked, he was alone in the witness cell; and when he put his
white hands to his hair, he felt that his head was shaven. The chipper
prison doctor told him that he was getting nicely over a brain fever.
* * * * *
It was three months after this before the case of Tom Muldoon came
upon the docket. The man whom the saloon-keeper had shot had but just
been declared out of clanger and on the road to recovery.
When the case was called, the district attorney arose from his
desk under the bench, and represented to the court that as for some
unforeseen reason the said Frank Stevens, who had been maliciously and
wilfully assaulted and shot by the said Tom Muldoon, had refused to
prosecute, the prosecution rested upon the government, which would
rely upon the direct evidence of one witness to sustain the case.
The district attorney, who was an unbought man, and whose future
election depended upon the number of convictions he secured for the
State, now opened his case with such decision, vigor, and masterful
certainty that the policemen and other friends of the defendant began
to quake for the boss of the--th Ward.
"And now, your honor, I will call to the witness-stand a young man of
stainless life, whom the government has held as a witness since the
brutal assault was committed. He is in the custody of the sheriff of
the county, Isaac Masters!"
All eyes turned to the door at the left of the bench. There was a
bustle of expectancy, and a pallor upon the face of Tom Muldoon.
"Isaac Masters!" repeated the attorney impatiently. "Will the court
officer produce the witness?"
The judge rapped his pencil on the desk in a nervous tattoo. Above all
things he detested delay.
"I hope Your Honor will grant me a few moments," said the attorney,
annoyed. "The witness must surely be here directly."
"It can go over--" began the judge indulgently, when he was
interrupted by the entrance of the sheriff of the county himself. This
man beckoned to the district attorney, and the two whispered together
with the appearance of great excitement.
"Well?" said the judge, yawning. "Produce your witness."
But the attorney for the government came back to his place slowly,
with head bent. He was very pale, and evidently much shaken. The
saloon-keeper's face expanded with hope, as he leaned aside and
whispered to a friendly wardman.
What was the evidence? Where was the witness? Silent? Why? The
question flashed from face to face in the court-room. Had he escaped?
Or been spirited away? Such things had been known to happen. Or had he
become insane during his incarceration? Such things had been known to
happen, too. Gentlemen of the law! Gentlemen of the jury! Sheriff
of the county! Judge of the Superior Court! Where is the witness? We
demand him on penalty of contempt. Contempt of your Honorable Court?
Contempt of court!
What? Is he not here? After all this cost to the State, and to the
man? Why has he not met his enforced appointment? If not here, why
was the innocent witness suffocated behind bars and walls, while the
murderer was free to dispense rum?
"Your Honor," began the attorney, with white lips, "a most unfortunate
occurrence has happened, one that the government truly deplores. The
witness has been suddenly called away. In fact, Your Honor--hem!--in
short, I have been informed by the sheriff that the witness cannot
answer to the summons of the court. He is disqualified from subpoena.
In fact, Your Honor, the witness died this morning."
The lawyer took out his handkerchief ostentatiously. He then bent to
his papers with shaking hands. He looked them over carefully while the
court held its breath.
"As the government is not in possession of any evidence against
Muldoon, I move to nolle prosequi the case."
"It is granted," said the judge, with a keen glance at the bloated
prisoner, whom wardmen and officers of the law were already
congratulating profusely.
"Order!" continued the judge. "Prisoner, stand up! You are allowed
to go upon your own recognizance in the sum of two hundred and fifty
dollars."
The next case was called, a new crowd entered the vitiated room,
and the court proceeded with its routine as if nothing unusual had
happened.
And the silent witness has passed out of every memory but mine, and
that of one poor girl mourning in the New Hampshire hills.
[Illustration: THE SUN'S LIGHT]