Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of
respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have
brought one heart-mellowing recollection. In the morning it was old
John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to
spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey. Past
that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried
to eat.
"They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap
up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided.
"I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before
you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no
sir-ee, I wasn't."
"I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to
say. And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge
against me is."
"I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober
rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard. They say you've been
takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder
in the Rocky Mountains."
"Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"
"Ab Withers."
Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man
on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially
detested. Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his
feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm,
making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a
part of the plan. More than once I had half suspected that he was in
with Geddis on the mining deal, but I had no proof of this.
"You say they were getting ready to railroad me out of town last night:
I suppose they will do it to-day, won't they?"
"Not if I can help it, Bertie. I'm goin' to try to hold you here till
you've had time to kind of straighten yourself around and ketch up with
the procession. I don't know what in Sam Hill you wanted to go and
bu'st yourself up for, this way, but I'm owin' it to Amos Weyburn dead
to help his boy get some sort of a fair show for his white alley. You
ask me anything in reason, and I'll do it."
I considered the most necessary requirements hastily. My mother and
sister were absent on a visit to a distant relative in the far-away
Saskatchewan wheat country, and I thanked God for that. It was
altogether unlikely that they would see any of the home newspapers, for
some time, at least, and any anxiety on that score might be dismissed,
or at all events postponed. The most pressing need was for a lawyer,
and since lawyers do not serve without fees, I was glad to remember
that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault,
would enable me to pay as I went.
By this time, in bitter revulsion from gratitude to fierce enmity, I
was determined to defend myself tooth and nail. At one stroke Abel
Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him. At the very moment
when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he
had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.
"I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first
and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes. "Send word to Cy
Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."
If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had
chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered
any justifiable reason. Whitredge was known throughout our end of the
State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation
built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of
justice. Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was
likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.
I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when
Whitredge came to see me. He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with
an eye like that of a fish. To my consternation and keen
disheartenment he assumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was
locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to
nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.
"You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he
criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold
the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had
known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do
anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your
counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by
insisting to me that you are not guilty."
There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly asserted my
innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft
to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the
intention.
"You can't deny--you don't deny--that you knew these mining sharps,
Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them
frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you
knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over,"
was Whitredge's summing up of the situation. "You'll have to loosen
up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help. I'll come around again
this afternoon, and maybe by that time you will have taken a tumble to
yourself."
He got up, rattled the door for the turnkey, and then wheeled upon me
with a sharp question.
"I take it you've got a little ready money hid away somewhere, haven't
you?" he demanded.
I told him I had; but when I added that my savings were all in the bank
he swore impatiently.
"That will mean an order from the court before you can even pay your
counsel's retainer--always providing your account hasn't already been
attached to apply on the shortage," he snapped; and at that the
corridor officer came to let him out and he went away.
Having lived in Glendale practically all my life, I had a good right to
expect that at least a few of my friends would rally to my support in
the time of trouble. They came, possibly a half-dozen of them in all,
between Whitredge's visit and old John Runnels's bringing of my dinner
at one o'clock.
Who they were, and what they said to me, are matters which shall be
burled in the deepest pit of oblivion I can find or dig. For the best
of them, in the turning of a single leaf in the lifebook, I had
apparently become an outcast, a pariah. One and all, they had already
tried and condemned me unheard, and though there were clammy-handed
offers of assistance they were purely perfunctory, as I could see, and
there was never a man of them all to say heartily, "Bert Weyburn, I
don't believe it of you." It wasn't the fault of any of these cold
comfort bringers that the milk of human kindness didn't turn to vinegar
in me that day, or that I did not drink the cup of bitterness and
isolation to the very dregs.
I know now, of course, that I was boyishly hot-hearted and unfair; that
I was too young and inexperienced to make allowances for that deathless
trait in human nature--in all animate nature--which prompts the well to
recoil instinctively from the pest-stricken. Later on--but I needn't
anticipate.
It was along in the latter part of the afternoon, and before
Whitredge's return, that Agatha came. Her appearance in my cell was a
total surprise. I was standing at the little grated window when I
heard footsteps in the corridor. I thought it was Whitredge coming
back, and was morose enough not to turn or look around until after the
door had opened and clanged shut again. Then I wheeled to find myself
looking straight into the man-melting eyes.
"Oh, Herbert!" she gasped; and with that she dropped upon the cot and
put her face in her hands.
If only the women wouldn't weep at us how vastly different this world
would be! All day long I had been praying that I might some time have
the chance to hold a mirror up to Agatha Geddis; a mirror that would
reflect her soul and show her what a mean and shriveled thing it was.
But what I did was to sit beside her and put my arm around her and try
to comfort her as I might have comforted my sister.
When her sobbing fit had subsided and she began to talk I found out
what she had come for--or I thought I did. It was all a miserable
mistake--so she protested--and Abner Withers was the responsible one.
It was he who had insisted that I should be arrested and prosecuted;
and, thus far, her father had not been able to make him listen to
reason. But it would come out all right in the end, if I would only be
patient and wait. Mr. Whitredge had been up to the house to see her
father, and they had had a long talk. Among other things, she had
heard her father say that he would bear all the expenses, meaning--I
supposed--that he would see to it that Whitredge did not lose his fee.
I have more than once had professional mesmerists try to hypnotize me,
without success. But there is little doubt that Agatha Geddis turned
the trick for me that afternoon in the steel cell of the Glendale
police station. As she talked, my heart grew putty-soft again. As
before, she dwelt upon the terrible consequences, the awful disgrace,
the wreck of her happiness, and all that; and once more I promised her
that I would stand by her. Even after she had gone I told myself that
since the worst had already happened, it would be cowardly and unmanly
to turn back.
Later, when the reaction came, it is more than likely that I swung back
to the other extreme, writing Agatha Geddis down in the book of bitter
remembrances as a cold-blooded, plotting fiend in woman's form. She
was not that. It may be said that, at this earlier period, she was
merely a loosely bound fagot of evil potentialities. Doubtless the
threatened cataclysm appeared sufficiently terrifying to her, and she
was willing to use any means that might offer to avert it. But it may
be conceded, in bare justice, that in this stage of her development she
was nothing worse than a self-centered young egoist, immature, and
struggling, quite without malice, to make things come her way.
It was quite late in the afternoon when Whitredge made his second visit
to my cell, and this time his attitude was entirely different. Also,
he dropped the curt use of my surname.
"We're going to ignore the question of your culpability for the
present, Bert, and wrestle with the plain facts of the case," was the
way he began on me. "From what you said this morning, I was led to
infer that you had some notion of trying to shift the responsibility to
Mr. Geddis. I won't say that something couldn't be done along that
line; not to do you any good, you understand, but to do other folks a
lot of harm. You could probably roil the water and stir up the mud
pretty badly for all concerned. But in the outcome, and before a jury,
you'd be likely to get the hot end of it. I'll be frank with you. If
I were in your shoes, I'd rather have Geddis for me than against me.
He has money and influence, and you are a young man without either."
"You are trying to advise me to plead guilty?" I asked.
"Oh, of course, the formal plea in court would be 'Not guilty.' I'm
merely advising you not to make the fight vindictive. If you don't,
I'm inclined to believe that Geddis will stand by you and you'll get
off easy."
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I would fight to the last
gasp before I would suffer myself to be tried and condemned for a crime
of which I was innocent. Then the distorted sense of honor got in its
work again. Agatha Geddis's visit was still recent enough to make me
believe that I owed her something.
"You'll have to get me out of it in some way," I returned. "I can't
afford to be convicted."
"Abel Geddis has been a pretty good friend of yours in the past, Bert,"
the lawyer suggested. "You don't want to forget that."
"I'm not forgetting it, and I'm giving him all the credit that is due
him. But you can't blame me for thinking a little of my mother and
sister, and myself. You know what a prison sentence means to a man,
better than I do. I couldn't stand for that."
Whitredge stroked his long chin and looked past me out of the little
grated window.
"We'd hope for the best, of course," he returned. "If we can make it
appear as an error in judgment"--there was that cursed phrase
again--"without any real criminal intention, and if we can prove that
you didn't reap any monetary benefit from the transfer of the mining
stock, there is good reason to hope that the court may be lenient. Do
I understand that you are giving me a free hand in the case, Bert?"
"I don't see that there is anything else for me to do," I said,
half-doubtfully; and as he was going I asked him about the question of
bail.
"I have waived the preliminary examination for you--merely to save you
the humiliation of appearing in a justice's court in Glendale," was the
evasive reply.
"But without the examination I shan't have a chance to offer bail,
shall I?"
Whitredge shook his head. "The guaranty company that is on your bond
beat us to it, I'm sorry to say. They sent their attorney over from
Cincinnati last night, and he is here now, prepared to refuse the
company's consent in the matter of ball. That is another reason why,
acting for you, I have waived the preliminary. Without the guaranty
company's assent to the arrangement it would be useless for us to offer
sureties, though Geddis and two or three others have expressed their
willingness to sign for you."
"Then what am I to expect?"
"Nothing worse than a little delay. Court is in session, and you will
be taken to Jefferson. If the grand jury finds a true bill against
you, the cause will probably be tried at the present term of court.
There need be nothing humiliating or embarrassing for you here in
Glendale. Sam Jorkins will take you over to Jefferson on the midnight
train, and you needn't see any of the home-town folks unless you want
to."
Remembering the clammy handshakings of the forenoon, I thought I should
never again want to see anybody that I knew. And thus I made the
second of the miserable blunders which led to all that followed.
"Let it be that way," I said. "If Jorkins will go with me up to Mrs.
Thompson's so that I can get a few things and pack a grip----"
"Oh, of course," said Whitredge, readily enough. "I'll have a carriage
to take you to the train, and it can drive around by your
boarding-house. But you mustn't try to run away. I suppose you
wouldn't do anything like that, would you?--even if you had a good
chance?"