THE STATE _VS._ NEWBOLT
The court-house at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long
windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all
around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill,
upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in
the center of which the court-house stood, and close around the
building.
In a corner of the plaza, beneath the largest and oldest of these
spreading trees, stood a rotting block of wood, a section of a giant
tree-trunk, around which centered many of the traditions of the place.
It was the block upon which negro slaves had been auctioned in the fine
old days before the war.
There was a bench beside the approach to the main door, made from one of
the logs of the original court-house, built in that square more than
sixty years before the day that Joe Newbolt stood to answer for the
murder of Isom Chase. The old men of the place sat there in the summer
days, whittling and chewing tobacco and living over again the stirring
incidents of their picturesque past. Their mighty initials were cut in
the tough wood of the bench, to endure long after them and recall
memories of the hands which carved them so strong and deep.
Within the court-house itself all was very much like it had had been at
the beginning. The court-room was furnished with benches, the judge sat
behind a solemn walnut desk. The woodwork of the room was thick with
many layers of paint, the last one of them grim and blistered now,
scratched by stout finger-nails and prying knife-blades. The stairway
leading from the first floor ascended in a broad sweep, with a turn
half-way to the top.
The wall along this stairway was battered and broken, as if the heels of
reluctant persons, dragged hither for justice to be pronounced upon
them, had kicked it in protest as they passed. It was as solemn and
gloomy a stairway as ever was seen in a temple of the law. Many had gone
up it in their generation in hope, to descend it in despair. Its treads
were worn to splinters; its balustrade was hacked by the knives of
generations of loiterers. There was no window in the wall giving upon
it; darkness hung over its first landing on the brightest day. The just
and the unjust alike were shrouded in its gloomy penumbra as they
passed. It was the solemn warder at the gate, which seemed to cast a
taint over all who came, and fasten a cloud upon them which they must
stand in the white light of justice to purge away.
When the civil war began, the flag of the Union was taken down from the
cupola of the court-house. In all the years that had passed since its
close, the flag never had been hoisted to its place of honor again. That
event was not to take place, indeed, until twenty years or more after
the death of Isom Chase, when the third court-house was built, and the
old generation had passed away mainly, and those who remained of it had
forgotten. But that incident is an incursion into matters which do not
concern this tale.
Monday morning came on dull and cloudy. Shelbyville itself was scarcely
astir, its breakfast fires no more than kindled, when the wagons of
farmers and the straggling troops of horsemen from far-lying districts
began to come in and seek hitching-room around the court-house square.
It looked very early in the day as if there was going to be an unusual
crowd for the unusual event of a trial for murder.
Isom Chase had been widely known. His unsavory reputation had spread
wider than the sound of the best deeds of the worthiest man in the
county. It was not so much on account of the notoriety of the old man,
which had not died with him, as the mystery in the manner of his death,
that people were anxious to attend the trial.
It was not known whether Joe Newbolt was to take the witness-stand in
his own behalf. It rested with him and his lawyer to settle that; under
the law he could not be forced to testify. The transcript of his
testimony at the inquest was ready at the prosecutor's hand. Joe would
be confronted with that, and, if there was a spark of spunk in him,
people said, he would rise up and stand by it. And then, once Sam Lucas
got him in the witness-chair, it would be all day with his evasions and
concealments.
Both sides had made elaborate preparations for the trial. The state had
summoned forty witnesses; Hammer's list was half as long. It was a
question in the public speculation what either side expected to prove or
disprove with this train of people. Certainly, Hammer expected to prove
very little. His chief aim was to consume as much time before the jury
as possible, and disport himself in the public eye as long as he could
drag out an excuse. His witnesses were all from among the old settlers
in the Newbolt neighborhood over in Sni, who had the family record from
the date of the Kentucky hegira. They were summoned for the purpose of
sustaining and adding color to the picture which Hammer intended to draw
of his client's well-known honesty and clean past.
Fully an hour before Judge Maxwell arrived to open court, the benches
down toward the front were full. This vantage ground had been
preempted mainly by the old men whose hearing was growing dim. They
sat there with their old hands, as brown as blackberry roots, clasped
over their sticks and umbrellas, their peaked old chins up, their eyes
alert. Here and there among them sat an ancient dame, shawled and
kerchiefed, for the day was chill; and from them all there rose the
scent of dry tobacco-leaves, and out of their midst there sounded
the rustling of paper-bags and the cracking of peanut-shells.
"Gosh m' granny!" said Captain Bill Taylor, deputy sheriff, as he stood
a moment after placing a pitcher of water and a glass on the bench,
ready for Judge Maxwell's hand. "They're here from Necessity to
Tribulation!"
Of course the captain was stretching the territory represented by that
gathering somewhat, for those two historic post offices lay farther away
from Shelbyville than the average inhabitant of that country ever
journeyed in his life. But there was no denying that they had come from
surprising distances.
There was Uncle Posen Spratt, from Little Sugar Creek, with his
steer's-horn ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife,
July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a road
that pitched from end to end when it didn't slant from side to side, and
took a shag-barked, sharp-shinned, cross-eyed wind-splitter to travel.
There sat old Bev Munday, from Blue Cut, who hadn't been that far away
from home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on his
head; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he'd keep
it there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, from
Sni-a-bar Township was over there in the corner where he could slant up
and spit out of the window, and there was California Colboth, as big
around the waist as a cow, right behind him. She had came over in her
dish-wheeled buggy from Green Valley, and she was staying with her
married son, who worked on the railroad and lived in that little
pink-and-blue house behind the water-tank.
Oh, you could stand there--said Captain Taylor--and name all the old
settlers for twenty-seven mile in a ring! But the captain hadn't the
time, even if he was taken with the inclination, for the townspeople
began to come, and it was his duty to stand at the door and shut off the
stream when all the benches were full.
That was Judge Maxwell's order; nobody was to be allowed to stand around
the walls or in the aisles and jig and shuffle and kick up a disturbance
just when the lawyers or witnesses might be saying something that the
captain would be very anxious to hear. The captain indorsed the judge's
mandate, and sustained his judgment with internal warmth.
General Bryant and Colonel Moss Punton came early, and sat opposite each
other in the middle of the aisle, each on the end of a bench, where they
could look across and exchange opinions, yet escape being crowded by the
mongrel stock which was sure to come pouring in soon. A good many
unnoted sons of distinguished fathers arrived in pairs and troops, with
perfumery on their neckties and chewing-gum in their teeth; and their
sisters, for the greater part as lovely as they were knotty, warty,
pimply, and weak-shanked, came after them in churchlike decorum and
settled down on the benches like so many light-winged birds. But not
without a great many questioning glances and shy explorations around
them, not certain that this thing was proper and admissible, it being
such a mixed and dry-tobacco atmosphere. Seeing mothers here,
grandfathers there, uncles and aunts, cousins and neighbors everywhere,
they settled down, assured, to enjoy the day.
It was a delightfully horrid thing to be tried for murder, they said,
even though one was obscure and nobody, a bound servant in the fields of
the man whom he had slain. Especially if one came off clear.
Then Hammer arrived with three law-books under his arm. He was all sleek
and shining, perfumed to the last possible drop. His alpaca coat had
been replaced by a longer one of broadcloth, his black necktie surely
was as dignified and somberly learned of droop as Judge Burns', or Judge
Little's, or Attorney Pickell's, who got Perry Norris off for stealing
old man Purvis' cow.
Mrs. Newbolt was there already, awaiting him at the railing which
divided the lawyers from the lawed, lawing, and, in some cases,
outlawed. She was so unobtrusive in her rusty black dress, which looked
as if it were made of storm-streaked umbrellas, that nobody had noticed
her.
Now, when they saw her stand and shake hands with Hammer, and saw Hammer
obsequiously but conspicuously conduct her to a chair within the sacred
precincts of the bar, there were whisperings and straightenings of
backs, and a stirring of feet with that concrete action which belongs
peculiarly to a waiting, expectant crowd, but is impossible to segregate
or individually define.
Judge Maxwell opened the door of his chamber, which had stood tall and
dark and solemnly closed all morning just a little way behind the bench,
and took his place. At the same moment the sheriff, doubtless timing
himself to the smooth-working order, came in from the witness-room,
opening from the court-room at the judge's right hand, with the
prisoner.
Joe hesitated a little as the sheriff closed the door behind them, his
hand on the prisoner's shoulder, as if uncertain of what was next
required of him. The sheriff pushed him forward with commanding gesture
toward the table at which Hammer stood, and Joe proceeded to cross the
room in the fire of a thousand eyes.
It seemed to him that the sheriff might have made the entrance less
spectacular, that he could have brought him sooner, or another way. That
was like leading him across a stage, with the audience all in place,
waiting the event. But Joe strode along ahead of the sheriff with his
head up, his long, shaggy hair smoothed into some semblance of order,
his spare garments short and outgrown upon his bony frame. His arms were
ignominiously bound in the sheriff's handcuffs, linked together by half
a foot of dangling chain.
That stirring sigh of mingled whispers and deep-drawn breaths ran over
the room again; here and there someone half rose for a better look. The
dim-eyed old men leaned forward to see what was coming next; Uncle Posen
Spratt put up his steer's-horn trumpet as if to blow the blast of
judgment out of his ear.
Joe sat in the chair which Hammer indicated; the sheriff released one
hand from the manacles and locked the other to the arm of the chair.
Then Captain Taylor closed the door, himself on the outside of it, and
walked down to the front steps of the court-house with slow and stately
tread. There he lifted his right hand, as if to command the attention of
the world, and pronounced in loud voice this formula:
"Oy's, oy's, oy's! The hon'r'bl' circuit court of the _hum_teenth
judicial de-strict is now in session, pursu'nt t' 'j'urnm'nt!"
Captain Taylor turned about as the last word went echoing against the
First National Bank, and walked slowly up the stairs. He opened the
court-room door and closed it; he placed his back against it, and folded
his arms upon his breast, his eyes fixed upon a stain on the wall.
Judge Maxwell took up some papers from the desk, and spread one of them
before him.
"In the matter of Case No. 79, State _vs._ Newbolt. Gentlemen, are you
ready for trial?"
The judge spoke in low and confidential voice, meant for the attorneys
at the bar only. It scarcely carried to the back of the room, filled
with the sound-killing vapors from five hundred mouths, and many of the
old men in the front seats failed to catch it, even though they cupped
their hands behind their ears.
Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose.
Slight and pale, with a thin chest and a stoop forward, he was
distinguished by the sharp eyes beside his flat-bridged nose, so
flattened out, it seemed, by some old blow, that they could almost
communicate with each other across it. His light, loose hair was very
long; when he warmed up in speaking he shook it until it tumbled about
his eyes. Then it was his habit to sweep it back with the palm of his
hand in a long, swinging movement of the arm. It was a most expressive
gesture; it seemed as if by it he rowed himself back into the placid
waters of reasoning. Now, as he stood before Judge Maxwell, he swept his
palm over his forelock, although it lay snug and unruffled in its
place.
"Your honor, the state is ready," said he, and remained standing.
Hammer pushed his books along the table, shuffled his papers, and
rose ponderously. He thrust his right hand into the bosom of his coat
and leaned slightly against the left in an attitude of scholarly
preparedness.
"Your honor, the defense is ready," he announced.