The Hermit of Turkey Hollow
Alibi.
“Alibi (al’-i-bi) n. 1. In law, a plea of having been elsewhere at the
time an offense is alleged to have been committed. Hence.--a. The fact
or state of having been elsewhere at the time specified; as, “he
attempted to prove an alibi.”--Cent. Dict.
“If it (alibi) appeared to be founded in truth, it is the best
negative evidence that can be offered. It is really positive evidence
which in the nature of things necessarily implieth a negative.”
Foster, J. Crown Law, 3rd Ed. p. 368 (1762).
“If any one fact necessary to the conclusion is wholly inconsistent
with the hypothesis of the guilt of the accused, it breaks the chain
of circumstantial evidence, upon which the inference depends; and,
however plausible or apparently conclusive the other circumstances may
be, the charge must fail. Of this character is the defense usually
called an alibi; that is, that the accused was elsewhere at the time
of the offense is alleged to have been committed. If this is true, it
being impossible that the accused could be in two places at the same
time, it is a fact inconsistent with that sought to be proved, and
excludes its possibility,” Shaw, C.J., in Commonwealth _vs._ Webster,
5 Cush. 299, 318 (1850).
The
Hermit of Turkey Hollow
I
“All the same,” affirmed “Skinny the Tramp,” “some one o’ these days
them bugs’ll wiggle themselves off’n their pins--an’ do for ye!”
The “Hermit of Turkey Hollow” laughed derisively as he paused in
pinning a large gray moth against the wall of the shanty.
“That’s all bunk!” he asserted with a show of bravado which, however,
concealed a certain uneasiness. “When a thing’s dead--it’s dead! And
that’s the end of it!” he added, pushing in the pin firmly until the
moth, giving a final flutter, remained motionless.
Skinny shook his head.
“No, it ain’t!” said he with conviction. “Nuthin’ ever really
dies--or, if it does, that ain’t the end of it by any manner o’ means!
Your body kin die--like a cocoon--but somethin’ goes on after--like
the butterfly.”
The Hermit threw a nervous glance in the direction of the moth, and
then, evidently reassured, nonchalantly removed a piece of cut plug
from his trousers pocket, bit off an end and held it out to the tramp,
who bisected the remainder.
“But the butterfly dies--” concluded the Hermit decisively, “and then
that’s the end of it--for good an’ all!”
Skinny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked round the
smelly little shanty, the sides of which were decorated with a
heterogeneous collection of defunct beetles, moths and butterflies.
“The butterfly don’t die--no more’n the cocoon!” declared he. “Nuthin’
dies. The moth flies away out o’ the cocoon, and then--when the moth
dies--somethin’ flies away out o’ the moth.”
“But you can’t see nuthin’,” remarked the Hermit with significance.
“I don’t know whether ye can or not!” replied the tramp
noncommittally. “Some says ye can an’ some says ye can’t. Some claim
they’ve photographed the human soul!”
“What do them as claim ye can see it say it’s like?” inquired the
Hermit in a tone of incredulity, in which nevertheless were mingled
awe and curiosity.
“Mostly like a butterfly--somethin’ with wings--so’s it kin fly, I
s’pose.”
“Huh!” retorted the Hermit. “Just pure bull! That moth, now--how can
you say it ain’t dead?”
Skinny’s jaws relinquished their extreme vigor of motion, as he leaned
forward earnestly towards the Hermit.
“Listen, Bo!” he adjured him. “You think you know all about bugs, an’
worms, an’ snakes, an’ yerbs, an’ trees, an’ weather. An’ I reckon you
do, too! But you don’t ponder none compared to me. I don’t do nuthin’
but think, ’cause I ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I lie an’ meditate
most all the time. And I hear things--and sense ’em. Sometimes I sit
harkenin’ all night long. I know a lot more’n most folks about things
you can’t see.”
“I don’t say you don’t, Skinny!” admitted the Hermit politely. “I
don’t deny it!”
“There’s two worlds,” affirmed the tramp. “One you kin see an’ smell
an’ touch and one that you ordinarily can’t--right alongside t’other.
But sometimes--dependin’ on circumstances--you can catch a glimpse of
what’s goin’ on there--see ’em an’ hear ’em. You’ve seen ghosts!”
“Sure, I’ve seen ghosts. Everybody’s seen ’em!” readily assented his
companion.
“Well,” continued the tramp, “everythin’ has a ghost--walkin’ right
along beside it all the time--only it’s in that other world--the one
you don’t see.”
“But things don’t have ghosts!” declared the Hermit. “A thing must
have been alive sometime to have a ghost.”
“Everything’s alive!” asserted the tramp. “Rocks an’ trees an’ flowers
an’ water an’ fire an’ bugs an’ beasts as well as folks,--an’ they all
have ghosts an’ none of ’em ever die. An’ they all have a right to
live in the world they’re in until they naturally pass on into the
other. Now, when they go--maybe they go one way, maybe another; but
they all do go; and some folks claim to have seen ’em. An’ mostly they
go with wings--flyin’--shaped like a moth or somethin’ like that.”
The Hermit spat disdainfully through the open doorway.
“Huh!” he remarked with sarcasm. “An’ I s’pose,--you’d say,--when I
die I’ll go flyin’ away like a big gray moth?”
“Like as not!” returned Skinny cheerfully. “Like as not! You got to go
somehow, ain’t ye?”
“All bull!” repeated the Hermit. “You’re just a nut!”
“Just the same!” returned Skinny the Tramp, “leavin’ out entirely me
bein’ a nut, I wouldn’t kill anythin’ that’s alive an’ can feel--for
money! I hate even to put an axe to a tree an’ see the sap ooze out.
How do we know it ain’t sufferin’? An’ when it comes to live
things--I’d be skeert!”
He let his eyes wander over the shanty walls thickly populated with
tiny corpses and shuddered slightly.
“Yus! I’d be skeert to live in this house! Sometime they’ll have their
vengeance!--An’--just as I said,--one o’ these days, they’ll come
wigglin’ off’n them pins an’--do fer ye!”
“An’ then,” mocked the Hermit of Turkey Hollow, “I’ll flutter off out
the winder like I was a moth! Bull, Skinny! All bull!”
* * * * * *
As may be inferred from the foregoing conversation the Hermit of
Turkey Hollow lived in the world of Fact, while Skinny the Tramp dwelt
in that of Faith,--which is to say, of Truth. Yet, as odd sticks,
there was little to choose between them. As being a house dweller--and
not a mere vagrant open to all the insidious imputations of
vagabondage--the Hermit may of the two have been entitled to greater
social recognition, but being a recluse, although something of a
curiosity and hence in the nature of a local asset,--he was
practically negligible as a factor in the life of the neighborhood.
Skinny the Tramp, on the other hand, was a sociable sort of being who
lived in the open, not because he loved his fellows less but because
he loved nature more.
Turkey Hollow lies three miles to the north and east of the thriving
town of Pottsville in the Mohawk Valley of the Empire State,
surrounded by low hills still thickly covered with second growth
timber; in spots, especially where Chasm Brook flows down into the
westerly end of Turtle Pond, wet and marshy; and elsewhere filled with
a tangled growth of Getchel birch, swamp maple, and alder, save for
the acre or so of cleared upland above the lake where stands the
Hermit’s now deserted shanty.
On the whole, the original turkeys having for several decades been
entirely extinct, the hollow offered no attractions to anybody, save
possibly to naturalists impervious to mosquito bites. It was in truth
a dank sort of place, full of underbrush, and inaccessible except by
the wood road leading to the Hermit’s abode, which some years he
cleared out and some he didn’t, and where you had to go afoot anyway.
Nevertheless, once you got there, you found that the hermit was a
genuine up-to-date hermit, with most of the modern improvements. For
he was neither a hundred years old with a bald pate and long white
whiskers like William Cullen Bryant or Father Time; nor did he mutter
incantations over a seething caldron like the witches in Macbeth, or
meander aimlessly about prattling to himself as conventional hermits
are supposed to do. And his shanty was no cave, but on the contrary a
comfortable enough one-story shack, with windows of glass which, while
they were nailed down tight and hence could not be opened, allowed
plenty of light to stream in. By the door usually stood a butterfly
net, a fish rod, and a hoe and spade,--for he had a small garden where
he raised such vegetables as he needed,--and on one side of the shanty
was a table, on the other his cot, over which by day was thrown a
discolored “comfortable,” while directly “on ax” with the door and
between the two rear windows was a tall, old-fashioned clock--the only
article of any value in the place.
This was, indeed, rather a strange object to be in the middle of the
woods and as it was of shining mahogany, its face decorated with the
sun, moon and stars, ships, savages and zodiacal signs, it was an
object of comment and surmise to the few who visited the place. No one
ventured to ask where it had come from or how the hermit had acquired
it, but he had been once heard to say that it made less noise than a
woman, talked no nonsense, and was all the company anyone had need of.
Even those who had never seen the hermit himself knew that he had a
clock. That is the way of things. People will refer for years to a man
as “the old chap who always wears that pair of gray trousers” and then
accidentally discover that he is a world famous civil engineer or
retired statesman who has swayed the fate of nations. So the hermit
was known by his clock; although regularly once a week he walked to
Pottsville to get his mail and buy groceries. For being an up-to-date
hermit he was not without an occupation,--he drank; and he did it very
well.
He was a large, lumbering man of about sixty years, full-bearded,
bent, frankly ungiven to washing and generally a shade woozy in the
upper story; and nobody could remember Turkey Hollow when he had not
been there.
He was reputed to be possessed of mysterious, ill-gotten wealth hidden
in and about the clearing, and, in spite of his squalor, the rumor
acquired a certain _cachet_ owing to the fact that his correspondence,
regularly inspected by Constable Higgins out of abundant caution,
consisted almost entirely of get-rich-quick-circulars and similar
catch-penny advertisements. His name, which otherwise might never have
been known, was Wilbur Drake,--although he was never referred to as
anything but the “Hermit of Turkey Hollow.” That was his sum total--to
the world at large.
Yet sometime and somewhere, he had perhaps been somebody; and nailed
over his cot in a tarnished oaken frame was a dingy photograph of a
dumpy little girl in pigtails. Why this sick soul had sought seclusion
nobody knew and nobody cared, yet afterwards, although he was morose,
taciturn and brutal in his manners, the Pottsville folk were sorry for
him and regretted that they had not been kinder to him.
Skinny the Tramp was a totally different type of bird,--a “character”
as they all said, beloved of the village children and regarded with
good-natured tolerance by their elders. He was tall, lean, hawkish,
with the traditional stubble about his chin and neck, which a Byronic
negligée exposed to wind and weather. He belonged to Pottsville in
his own way quite as much as did the hermit, for in spite of his
peripatetic sojournings, he was a native of the town and, as James
Hawkins, had passed those earlier days--before manual labor had been
abhorrent to him--in its vicinity, having been even at one time
admitted to the lowlier degrees of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian
Mysteries. This famous order, however, he had ultimately abandoned in
favor of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides, of which he was now a
member in good standing.
The reader will, of course, appreciate that for various
reasons,--including that we may sometime run for public office--the
foregoing names and titles are fictitious; but the organizations
themselves are not, and each in its own way exerts an influence not
lightly to be disregarded, whether one be a yokel on the one hand, or
a yegg on the other. Twice yearly, once on his annual autumn trip to
the Golden West and again on his return therefrom in the spring,
Hawkins, emaciated, hairy, black from coal dust, dropped lightly off
the truck of some fast freight and revisited the scenes of his youth.
Sitting upon a cracker barrel in Colson’s Grocery--so that nutriment
might be the more easily accessible--Skinny the Tramp, like some
wandering scop, bard, or friar of medieval days--would fill the
wagging ears of the countryside with the narrative of his later
wanderings in search of the treasure that somehow always just managed
to elude his grasp. For Skinny believed absolutely that at the foot of
every rainbow there was a Crock of Gold, and he would have gladly died
for his belief--as any gentleman and sportsman would have done, and as
he came very near to doing in this case.
However, while Skinny chased rainbows he declined to do so
afoot--preferring the artificial and speedier means of transportation
afforded by the transcontinental railroad systems, from the trains of
which he was habitually--and at divers times and places,
ignominiously,--hurled, to his great physical and temperamental
detriment. Yet, albeit that he was a high officer of the Hibernating
Hoboes of Hesperides and had once been an Abyssinian Brother of that
elevation known as the “Order of the Sacred Camel of King Menelik,”
from which noble association he had been swiftly dropped for
non-payment of dues, he was, like a multitude of his fellow wanderers,
merely a harmless child of good-nature, nearly a half-wit, essentially
a devotee of Zoroaster, who spent his life following the sun. On these
biennial visits Skinny hung about the town, spending a goodly portion
of his time--both by night and by day--sleeping in a lean-to on the
hillside above Turkey Hollow, and part of it wandering through the
woods,--but always looking for the rainbow that should empty a hoard
of gold into his tattered lap.
Twice yearly also passed through Pottsville the “Sons and Daughters of
the Southland”--the Zingara Gipsies,--in auto trucks and
flivvers--camping for a time on the end of the old, deserted
racetrack,--a sinister crew, surreptitious panderers to credulity and
lust, the men surly and brutal, the women insolent and dirty, but
attracting the imaginative and susceptible bumpkins as a trickle of
molasses will draw a swarm of flies. When in the night they folded
their tents and stole silently away the citizens of Pottsville
invariably discovered that many of their most cherished personal
possessions were unaccountably missing. But no one cared to pursue and
prosecute them. They were too dangerous. Besides, they could have told
things.
In the case of Skinny the Tramp there was, however, a practical as
well as a sentimental reason for these half-yearly stop-overs, the
legal necessity of his putting in a personal appearance to claim and
receipt for the one hundred dollars of income which accrued to his
account every six months from the trust fund created by his mother in
her last will and testament, of which the Honorable--or
“Squire”--Hezekiah Mason was executor. And as Squire Mason is one of
the central figures in this legal tragi-comedy it may perhaps be worth
while to stop for a moment at this point and give him what might be
called the “literary once-over.”
Let us state frankly, without circumlocution or evasion, that while
Hezekiah was known as “honorable” and “squire,” this grim visaged,
tight-lipped country attorney was neither. He was “honorable” only in
a Pickwickian sense; and a “squire” only by courtesy; but why or how
any courtesy should have been extended to him remained a mystery,
since he was the most unpopular man in the county,--evidenced by the
fact that he alone of Pottsville’s masculine élite--which included
the barber, druggist, sheriff and dentist--was not one of the Sacred
Camels of King Menelik, and needless to say it rankled in his dried
peapod of a soul.
Nevertheless, the Hon. Hezekiah was a power for he had mortgages on a
majority of the farms of Somerset County already and his tentacles
were reaching out along the county highways and by-ways after the
others. Moreover, he was the only lawyer practising in either
Pottsville or Somerset Corners so that, in one way or another, he
managed to be mixed up in almost everything that went on. However, he
couldn’t break into the mystic circle of The Abyssinian Brotherhood,
which has a distinct bearing on our narrative. As Sheriff Moses
Higgins,--who was the Grand Supreme Exalted Patriarch and Ruler of the
Sacred Camels of King Menelik--had said at the lodge meeting held
three months before in the P. of H. (No. 769) Hall when Hezekiah had
made his final attempt to become one of the genus dromedary and had
been flatly and contumaciously turned down, refused, rejected,
rebuffed and repudiated--I repeat, as Sheriff Higgins had said on that
well known occasion, it made no difference how big a feller’s bank
account was if he was a stinker, and everybody who had an atom of
brains fer fifty miles ’round knew all-fired well what kind of a cuss
Mason was. Get a feller like that into the Camels and you never could
get rid of him--“once a Camel always a Camel”--the whole herd would be
contaminated. He’d sooner take in “Nigger” Jo, the colored ostler over
to the Phoenix House stable. He spoke fifteen minutes and there wasn’t
a white ball in the box when it was passed.
So Squire Mason nursed his antique grudge and took his revenge in coin
of the realm. Then came the turn of the wheel and Hezekiah found
himself in a position where by the adroit application of five thousand
dollars where it would do most good he could get a strangle hold on
one of the leading politicians of the county. The fact that the only
funds available were those he held as trustee for James Hawkins was
the merest incident and did not disturb him even momentarily. They
were at hand and he used them. Skinny was only a tramp. He might get
run over any day, just as, fortunately for Hezekiah, was Lawyer
Tompkins, of Felchville, the public prosecutor of Somerset, for whose
vacant job the Honorable Squire Mason instantly applied. As he had a
cinch on the local political boss, and as the attorney general needed
the influence of the boss in his own business, and as the attorney
general had a cinch on the governor--he won in a walk and duly became,
by official appointment and designation, for Tompkins’ unexpired term,
district attorney of Somerset County, and having, after forty years of
plodding obscurity, suddenly found himself elevated to office he
instantly became consumed by the fire of ambition. While Cicero says
that “the noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of
glory,” we do not intend by this mere statement of fact to entwine
with any wreath of bay or laurel the perspiring brow of Hezekiah.
Objectively Mason was a bombastic, old-fashioned country lawyer,
acrid, dry as dust, entirely unscrupulous, and, while superficially
shrewd, on the whole rather dull. Noise was his strong point, and
there was not a tougher pair of leather lungs in the Mohawk Valley,
down which he now looked with longing eyes towards the capital at
Albany, hoping perhaps to roar loud enough so that he could be heard
there, which at times seemed by no means impossible. Once ambition
stirs a man’s soul no height appears too high for him to scale.
“On the summit see,
The scales of office glitter in his eyes:
He climbs, he pants, he grasps them! At his heels,
Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends,
And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down,
And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”
And now, having had one piece of luck, the lightning of fortune, as
sometimes happens, struck him again.
Pottsville is the kind of “hick” town where the girls bob their hair
and the boys wear the very latest “pineapple” cut, where you can buy
“college ices” and “sundaes” at the drug store, but where the movies
run only twice a week and the barber shop is open only after four
o’clock on Saturdays. There is a smutty little wooden railroad
station, a memorial library of funereal granite, a brick business
block bearing date 1879, an octagonal horse-trough right in the middle
of Main Street, and the rickety old Phoenix Hotel, run by “Ma” Best,
_née_ Louisa Barrows, whose dad, “Old Doc Barrows,” was sent up to
Sing Sing for high-financing the countryside.
There are, in addition, two churches, Baptist and Methodist, each
white with green shutters and a steeple,--a court house, the Mohawk
Palace Theater (celluloid), the P. of H. Hall, the “Pottsville Dry
Goods Emporium” belonging to “Toggery Bill” Gookin, Meachem’s Notion
Store and Colson’s Grocery. The street is unpaved and from February to
April is ankle high with mud. Such towns still survive even in the
Empire State. But while Pottsville will refer to Somerset Corners five
miles away as a “hick” town, it remains serenely oblivious of its own
hickitude.
It was here that on a soft Saturday afternoon towards the end of
April, Squire Mason’s great moment came--that opportunity knocked upon
his office door and beckoned to him. And Hezekiah did not hesitate.
He had been more than usually sour all day, for he had quarreled with
his wife at breakfast and when he reached the office he had found that
a farmer over Felchville way whose mortgage he held--and on whose
prompt payment he had relied to cover James Hawkins’ semiannual
interest of like amount, had unexpectedly defaulted. And--curse
it!--at eleven o’clock Skinny had come for his money, peering
apologetically through the door like the half-wit that he was,
twisting his faded bicycle cap between his fingers, almost afraid to
ask the squire for what was his.
“Mornin’, squire,” he said, leaning awkwardly against the door jamb.
“Been well, I trust?”
The Honorable Hezekiah Mason regarded the tramp malevolently.
“Tol’rable!” he replied curtly. “I s’pose you’ve come after your
money.”
“Yes,” assented Skinny. “Still,” he added politely, “if it ain’t
convenient----” His blue eyes roved vaguely around the barren room
seeing nothing.
“Look here, Skinny!” remarked the lawyer gruffly, “what’s the use of
my turning over a hundred dollars to you to throw away? Why don’t you
let me keep it an’ invest it for you? The way you live ain’t
provident. A penny saved is a penny earned, an’ a hundred dollars is a
lot of money.”
“It’s very kind of you,” faltered Skinny, “but I don’t throw it away.
Honest Injun, I don’t. It keeps me wanderin’--I’d like it if you kin
let me have it.” He paused and took a timid step towards the squire.
“May I ask you a question?”
Now the one thing in the world that Squire Mason did not want was any
question from Hawkins about the whereabouts of his money. He had
intended to put the tramp off, but now he swiftly changed his mind.
“Your money’s all right,” he retorted, getting to his feet. “You don’t
need to worry any ’bout it! I’ll go get it fer you!”
“Thank you,” replied Skinny. “I was only goin’ to ask----”
But Mason had bolted through the door. Ten minutes later he returned
and handed the tramp five twenty dollar bills, for which he took
Skinny’s receipt.
“Now,” he remarked brusquely, “you’ve got your money. You better get
along. I’m busy this mornin’!”
But Skinny had a matter of vital moment upon what by a euphemism might
have been termed his mind. It had been troubling him ever since his
conversation with the hermit with which this chronicle opens. And he
wanted the opinion of Squire Mason, as a learned man who presumably
knew all about such things.
“I’d like to ask you a question, squire!” he persisted.
Mason, cornered in his office, turned on him like a rat.
“Well,--ask it!” he snapped defiantly.
“I want to ask you if folks that know about such things think that
when a thing’s dead it’s dead?”
The squire stared at him contemptuously.
“P’tah!” he ejaculated. “What are you ravin’ about?”
“About whether when folks die that’s the end of ’em,” explained
Skinny. “And if it’s the same with the animals.”
Mason took courage. Skinny was not bothered about the safety of his
principal.
“What’s the use conjecturin’ about things like that?” he asked more
genially.
“It’s kinder important, ain’t it?” returned the tramp.
The lawyer pursed his lips and gazed for an instant through the window
upon the sill of which a blue-bottle lay upon its back with its legs
stiffly in air. Then he turned sententiously to the tramp.
“If you really want to know what I think,” he answered. “When a man’s
dead, he’s dead.”
Skinny, his money in his pocket but troubled in his mind, made his way
slowly back to Turkey Hollow. The sun, which had been shining when he
had gone into the squire’s office, had become obscured by a bank of
cloud and it looked like rain, but all about him as he strode through
the woods the dogwoods were bursting into blossom amid a background of
diaphanous budding green. The spring was stirring in him, too. A
hundred dollars! Visions of purple valleys, of cool, trickling ravines
dank with spreading ferns, of fragrant fields of hay in which to
lie--without the necessity of chopping a single piece of kindling to
pay for his supper--rose in his mind. Wouldn’t it be great to be rich!
To lie in a hammock with a feather pillow under his head in the shade
of an orange tree and a nigger to hand him cool drinks and sandwiches
and gold-tipped cigarettes! To ride luxuriantly inside a Pullman car
or stand on the clinking back platform of the Sunset Limited watching
the misty mountains turn from azure to rose and from rose to
lilac--and pitying the bums walking the sleepers. To
sleep--sleep--sleep--in a big, soft bed! To have a man delicately
remove the hair from your neck and chin and scent your cheeks with
cologne water! To go into a grand hotel, bully the waiter, and eat
everything on the bill of fare without asking the price! Money! That
would do it. But a hundred dollars was only a flea bite! What he
needed was the real kale--a whole pot of gold!
It had begun to rain by the time he had cooked his dinner, and
afterwards, as he sat in the opening of his shack smoking cigarettes,
it grew very dark and for half an hour poured down in torrents. Then
as will happen in fickle April the sun burst forth and turned the
leaden world into a dripping golden grotto, where every bough and twig
and leaf’s edge gleamed with a jeweled setting of pearls and diamonds,
and the hot mist rose shimmering from the steaming ground. Gold--gold
everywhere! Gold--the mystic element sought of the alchemists and of
the philosophies of ancient, medieval and modern times alike. Gold!
Suddenly Skinny stiffened and sat erect. Thrown against the torn black
wind clouds of the departing storm was a great arch whose glowing
colors pained the eye, a perfect piece of heavenly architecture. High
it rose into the zenith a concentrated prismatic glory--emblem of the
eternal hope that sprang in the tramp’s breast. One end of the arc
came to earth far to the west--the golden west--and the other plunged
down at his feet into Turkey Hollow. There was no doubt about it at
all. Right into Turkey Hollow--right upon the hermit’s shanty, which
he could see through the interlacing boughs of the hillside sharply
defined as in a spotlight of saffron. Skinny started to his feet. If
he could only reach the hermit’s shanty before the rainbow faded the
crock of gold would be there. Sure! His mind never doubted it. It was
there now. If he hurried--this time he might find it! Without a
moment’s hesitation Skinny plunged down the hillside through the
reeking undergrowth, drenched to the skin, slipping, falling now on
beds of soaking moss, now over roots and stones--blood smearing his
face and hands--until he crashed down through the clump of birches
next the clearing.
A man was sitting there under a boulder smoking a pipe, his ax across
his knees--waiting evidently for things to dry up a bit. He waved at
Skinny, but the tramp was too intent to answer him. Then came the
yellow gleam of the clearing through the brush and the shanty rose
hard against the sky just beyond. Surely he must be in time!
He had emerged from the woods in the rear of the shanty on the edge of
the potato patch and he did not trouble to go around it but plowed
straight through the muddy rows, leaving a deep wake behind him across
the loam. Panting and dripping with sweat, Skinny hurried to the
nearest window of the shanty, the one above the hermit’s cot, and
peeked in. What he saw made his heart stand still. The sun was pouring
through the opposite window upon the back of the hermit, who sat bowed
over the table; and in front of him--its overflowing contents sending
yellow flashes darting into the dim recesses of the hut--stood a small
red bean-pot or “crock”--still sticky with earth--filled with shining
gold pieces. An expression of transcendental satisfaction illuminated
Skinny’s face. His faith was justified--as he had known and predicted
all along that eventually it would be. His confidence in his own
mental processes and spiritual beliefs rebounded from where it had
been crushed to earth by Squire Mason’s crass materialism.
Stealthily--so as not to frighten the hermit--he crept towards the
open door of the shanty.…
It was Charlie Emerson--the man sitting under the boulder with his ax
across his knees--who heard the shot that killed the hermit. He was
not a native of Pottsville, although he usually could be found there
every spring, working over at Sampson’s steam lumber mill at the lower
end of Turtle Pond. This particular Saturday he had got the afternoon
off to fill an order for pea sticks which he purposed cutting from the
birches which grew thick in the less swampy part of Turkey Hollow, and
he was right in the middle of it when the thunderstorm came up and he
had to stop for awhile until the sun should dry the bushes off.
He saw Skinny cruising through the underbrush and was puzzled by the
fact that the tramp ignored his salutation. But he had gone on smoking
and, after taking a short nap, had resumed his work on the pea sticks.
Then, as the sun had begun to slant through the tree trunks and the
shadow of the hill to come creeping across the marsh, the hot silence
of the afternoon had been shattered first by a cry for help and then
by a shot--both from the hermit’s shanty less than two hundred yards
away. Ax in hand he made the distance through the thickets in less
than three minutes, and as he broke cover into the clearing behind the
house he saw the undergrowth moving on the other side and heard the
snapping of twigs.
It was so still that he could hear the drone of a bee in the fringe of
meadow-sweet down by the well, and--coupled with the cry--it gave him
a weird creepy feeling such as he never knew before. But he took a
good grip on himself, walked round the shanty, and looked in through
the open door.
Everything was as usual--the clock, the cot, the rickety table, the
chair, the fish rod and butterfly net, all were undisturbed--except
that the hermit lay upon his back on the floor, his arms outstretched,
the blood jetting from his mouth, a film gathering in his wide open
eyes. Emerson knelt by the side of the dying man and gently lifted the
great hairy head. The blood that came from his mouth made a queer
guttering sound--grotesquely resembling to his agitated mind the faint
clucking of a hen. Then the noise stopped; the hermit no longer
breathed; and the lumberman as he lowered the hermit’s head to the
floor heard the loud beat of an insect’s wings and observed a large
gray moth flapping frantically against the window. He had seen a
million moths--! Yet, with relief Emerson saw it vanish through the
open doorway.
With averted face he threw the “comfortable” across the hermit’s body
and, as he did so, noticed the broken fragments of a small, red clay
pot lying beneath the table. One of the hermit’s hands protruded from
beneath the coverlet--grasping tightly a single gold-piece. Emerson,
standing in the stifling atmosphere of the hut, could hear no sound
but the beating in his ears of his own heart.
The mill hand dashed from the shanty, marking the footprints in the
garden patch, and hunted courageously for the murderer in the
surrounding woods; but the criminal had too good a start. Then, with
no doubt whatever in his mind as to who it had been, he ran down the
wood road that joined the main highway half a mile from the shanty.
There had been a big gang assembled in Colson’s Grocery waiting for
the barber shop to open next door when Skinny entered at almost
precisely four o’clock by the Western Union automatically regulated
clock over the candy counter; and, while nobody had paid much
attention to him at the time, it was remembered distinctly afterwards
that he had been breathing hard and excited, and had ordered a bottle
of root beer and drank it with a sort of ostentatious, devil-may-care
indifference. He had also remarked to someone that he had cut his
finger in the woods, and his handkerchief was bloody.
Most of the crowd were still there when, fifteen minutes later,
Charlie Emerson, the lumber man with the ax, reached the village with
the news that the hermit had been murdered.
He came running down the road all splashed with mud and the fellows in
Colson’s could hear him shouting nearly a furlong away. There was a
general stampede for the street,--in which the occupants of the brick
block, the barber shop, and the drug store all joined. Emerson came
staggering along--stopping every few yards to yell “Murder!”--and
brought up exhausted in front of the stairs leading to Squire Mason’s
office, which was opposite the sheriff’s on the first landing.
“Th’ hermit’s been murdered!” he panted hysterically. “Shot right
through the lungs!--Where’s the sheriff?--Gosh, it’s fierce!--Where’s
Squire Mason?”
The crowd surged round him, Squire Mason’s head appeared at his
window, and then, with a whoop, they all rushed up the stairs to the
sheriff’s office. But Mason held the crowd back sternly on the
landing.
“I’m prosecutor o’ this county!--I’ll take care o’ this witness!” he
announced in a tone of authority. “Now some o’ you hustle over and
fetch the sheriff--he’s gone down to the station fer the mail. An’
don’t none of you dare so much as move ’till he comes and tells you
what to do.--Now, you!” to the ax-man--“Come into my office an’ let me
take your deposition.”
There was a murmur of disappointment from the crowd as Mason firmly
conducted Emerson inside and shut the door; but they all obediently
poured down the stairs again after the sheriff. Then some one began to
ring the fire alarm and, by the time Sheriff Higgins reached the horse
trough, the mob was so dense in front of the doorway that he could
hardly force his way through. He was inside less than a minute before
he reappeared at Mason’s window.
“Anybody seen Skinny Hawkins?” he cried excitedly.
“He was here a minute ago!” answered someone.
“I seen him walkin’ off down the road towards the race track--just
afore the bell began ringin’!” yelled up a small boy.
“Well!” shouted Higgins, “get after him an’ stop him.--Don’t let him
get away!”
The next instant the pack were in full cry.
* * * * * *
Perhaps if Skinny hadn’t been a half-wit he wouldn’t have run. Perhaps
he should have pulled himself together--and with his pockets full of
the hermit’s gold and his boots covered with mud from the hermit’s
potato patch--he should have boldly answered: “Here I am! What do you
want of me?” and marched up to the sheriff’s office. But, on the other
hand, perhaps many a more sensibly-minded man than he under the same
unfortunate circumstances would have taken to his legs. Admit, it was
a foolish and useless thing to do! We have all on occasion lost our
nerve--even if we all be wise men. And certainly Skinny was not wise!
He could not deny having been in the hermit’s company within half an
hour, the gold was on his person, the mud upon his feet. He had been
caught almost, had his addled memory retained the phrase, _in
flagrante delicto_. Being a tramp, used to rough treatment even from
ordinarily kind people, accustomed to be called a vagabond and a thief
and to have the dogs set upon him, familiar from long experience with
his brother hoboes with tales of tortures and lynchings in which the
knotted rope and kerosene figured vividly, Skinny fled in a hysteria
of fear down the road towards the race track and thence across the
fields into the woods.
He was less than three minutes ahead of the crowd at the start and
unfortunately for him the sheriff’s flivver was standing in front of
the drug store, so that by the time he took cover they were actually
at his heels. Moreover, a dozen of the older boys sensing that he
might try to beat back towards the Hollow ran up the crossroad to cut
him off. The fact that most of them liked him was nothing. A chase was
a chase. Hare and hounds,--while it lasted. Besides, this was a hunt
for a murderer--and flight was equivalent to confession.
Badly winded, Skinny crashed through the woods, the shouts of his
pursuers close in his ears. Ahead he could see the blue sky through
the trees where the fields began again. He reached the edge and came
dead upon a man plowing. Faintly borne on the wind he heard the
distant clang of the fire bell and a couple of revolver shots from
nearer at hand. “Putt!” they said. “Putt-putt!” Skinny did not like
the sound of them. He ducked back and ran like a fagged fox along the
hedge by the field, then paused to listen again. There was a crackling
in the brush to the left while just beyond, on the other side of the
open, the barber and the drug clerk, who had followed a wood road
suddenly appeared staring directly at him.
“Hi!” yelled the barber, waving his razor which he had carried in his
hand. “Hi! Here he is! This way!”
The crackling behind him grew louder. He could see shadows stealthily
creeping from tree to tree. Of course they thought him armed! They
might shoot! He did not know what to do. He did not want either to be
carved up by the barber or to be blown to bits by a shotgun. His
tongue was like a baked potato and his lungs ached as if with
rheumatism. He could hardly see. There they were--hundreds of them--!
“’S all right, Bill!” he called hoarsely. “I ain’t tryin’ to git
away.”
And he staggered out a few feet between the furrows and fell in a
faint. It was characteristic of him that he had made no attempt to
throw away the hermit’s gold.
Twenty minutes later “Ma” Best, who had been quietly cooking in the
Phoenix House kitchen throughout the whole disturbance, heard a great
shouting down the road and went to the door to see what it was all
about. Over by the “deppo” she could see a crowd of men and boys
pushing or dragging somebody in their midst. The smaller of the boys
danced and capered ahead of the throng, one of them turning fancy
“cartwheels.” Then came Sheriff Higgins, stalking along importantly,
two men with shotguns on either side of him, followed by the barber,
Mr. Perkins the proprietor of the Mohawk Palace, and old Colson the
grocer. Directly behind this cluster of notables--who in a grotesque
way suggested a group of Roman senators escorted by their lictors--at
an interval of perhaps ten feet, walked Skinny the tramp, his face
pale as that of the murdered hermit, hatless, a rope around his neck,
and his hands bound behind his back. The end of the rope was held by
no less a personage than “Toggery Bill” Gookin, who providentially had
happened to be returning from a visit to Zayda the Zingara Gipsy
fortune teller at the moment of Skinny’s capture. From time to time
the haberdasher would jerk the rope as if the tramp were a horse and
the more light-minded in the crowd would cluck and call out “Geddap!”
For the rest, they swarmed along in a mob, yelling, joking, uttering
cat-calls and other vague and meaningless noises.
“What’s the trouble, sheriff?” called out “Ma” Best. “What yer doin’
with Skinny?”
The dignity of Sheriff Higgins did not permit him to make reply.
Instead the crowd yelled at her generally.
“’S killed the hermit!” shouted an urchin. “Murdered him!--Whoop-ee!
Hurray!”
“Murder nuthin’!” snorted “Ma” Best. “You’re jest a pack of
idiots.--Skinny wouldn’t kill a spider!”
“Whee-uup! Whoop! Hurray!” shrieked the crowd in the delight of having
conducted a successful man-hunt, jumping around “Toggery Bill” and his
victim, as a pack of hounds will jump, snapping and barking about the
body of the fox they have run to earth. “Whee-uup! Hurray!--Lynch him!
String him up!”
They had reached the horse-trough and the two men with the shotguns
held back the crowd while Sheriff Higgins relieved “Toggery Bill” of
the rope and led Skinny upstairs to his office. In a moment the
sheriff appeared at the window.
“Feller citizens of Pottsville!” he shouted. “In the name o’ the
People of the State of New York I call on ye to disperse peaceable and
go to your homes. There ain’t goin’ to be no lynchin’ nor nuthin’ like
that. Skinny’s goin’ to the jail and he’s goin’ to stay there until
the Grand Jury has acted on his case which will be day after
to-morrer. Now, there’s no use kickin’ up any fuss or ruction and I
warn ye not to go near Turkey Hollow. Kindly disperse!”
Skinny the Tramp having been treated to a brief and exceedingly crude
variety of the “third degree” in the sheriff’s office, and having
“stood mute,” was transferred to the calaboose, where Sam Bellows,
who, owing to his obesity, could not take any more active part, was
set to watch him. It is doubtful whether Skinny would have made any
further attempt to get away, even if “paroled in his own custody”; for
his flight had been the instant, automatic reaction from a paroxysm of
terror in which he visioned himself as a human torch--not the result
of any genuine hope that he could escape the processes of the law, for
whose far-reaching effectiveness he had in fact a vast respect.
Now that he had been brought back without having been lynched, his
instinct told him to hold his tongue. He was no match for them--not
even for Sheriff Higgins--and he knew it. If he said anything they
would twist it somehow against him. His only hope lay in the quantum
of evidence. Nobody had seen him at the hermit’s shanty, so why admit
that he had been there? That was only common caution. Anybody could
have gold pieces; and if he had left any tracks there was no way of
proving when they had been made. So Skinny obstinately refused to open
his mouth, and sat on a decayed chair in the unsanitary box resembling
a flagman’s shanty which passed for a jail while the youth--the
extreme youth--of Pottsville sat in rows around Sam Bellows, dividing
their attention between comments upon his beauty of person and audible
conjectures as to the probable fate of the murderer within.
Contemporaneously Squire Mason, having in his office reduced to
written form the testimony of Emerson the lumberman, unexpectedly
realized that he was confronted by a disturbing problem in legal
ethics. Here he was, hardly appointed district attorney a week before
the most sensational murder ever committed in the county had occurred
at his very door! It was his chance!--the chance of a lifetime!--a
sure conviction! But--and here was the rub!--were his relations to the
accused such that he could properly conduct the case against him? At
best could he take any more active part in the trial than as a mere
witness, considering the fact that he was trustee of the tramp’s money
and bore to him the confidential relationship of lawyer to client?
Could he even appear against him as a witness? Might not the half-wit,
indeed, have had murder in his mind that very morning when he had
asked him if “anything ever really died?” The squire’s hopes wilted at
the thought and his heart fell. Why, it was the biggest opportunity
for legitimate notoriety since the Rosenthal murder! It was ridiculous
to let a little thing like the fact that he was Skinny’s trustee make
any difference! No one would in fact need to know? If Skinny remained
mute, as he apparently intended to do, it probably would never come to
light,--at any rate not until Hawkins had been convicted, and then it
would sink into insignificance in the blaze of his glory. There was
nothing to connect him with Skinny in any way, for the five
twenty-dollar bills which he had delivered to the tramp that morning
had not been found upon him when he was arrested. No,--the chance was
worth taking. A brave man would take it; and fortune always favored
the brave!
Squire Mason, however, was not the only brave man in Pottsville, for
Sheriff Moses Higgins meanwhile had started for Turkey Hollow to make
an examination of the scene of the crime. With him in the flivver
officially designated as “Lizzie” were Emerson, the lumberman, the two
armed deputies and Mr. Pennypacker, the photographer from Somerset
Corners, for the sheriff was up on all the latest modern methods of
detecting crime and knew just how it should be done. And some day they
would all have to be witnesses and testify to exactly what they had
seen.
They left the flivver where the wood road from the Hollow joined the
highway and walked in the rest of the way on foot. It was a
circumstance commented on by all of them that the sheriff’s order,
that nobody should visit the scene of the murder until he had done so,
had been strictly obeyed. But the ghastly corpse of a murdered man is
its own best guardian--particularly if it be that of a hermit lying in
his blood--alone in a bosky, lonely spot--with evening coming on. The
peaceful inhabitants of Pottsville had no great hankering to see how
the dead hermit looked, much preferring the less grim sport of
tramp-baiting. So the five men met no one on their way; neither did
any sound break the silence of the woods about them.
An unexpected pall descended upon their spirits. It had been great
sport to jump into a motor with guns and cameras, and whirr off
consequentially in a cloud of dust, leaving the staring crowd gazing
enviously after them. They had even cracked jokes while they were on
the road. But now, with the sun already behind the ridge that framed
the Hollow upon which the shadows were closing steadily as if night
were about to clutch it in its fingers, with no sound save the creak
of their own boots or the gibber of a chipmunk in the alders to break
the deathly silence of the woods, they found conversation difficult.
The men with the shotguns felt fairly comfortable--although of course
it would be a cinch for anybody lurking in the bushes to shoot the lot
of them. But Sheriff Higgins, who although a sheriff and the Supreme
Exalted Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik had never seen a
dead body and was more of a “family man” than a bloodhound, and “Cy”
Pennypacker, whose most daring adventure had been to invite Zayda the
Zingara vamp to his studio to be photographed--for which he paid
heavily afterwards at home, and who now, owing to the weight of his
camera and plate holders, found difficulty in keeping up with the
others,--both these worthies secretly began to wish that they could
escape the duty which lay before them.
“Ssh!” suddenly whispered Emerson, and they all jumped; then stood
tensely in their tracks.
Far up on the dark hillside could be heard at intervals of a few
seconds the snapping of twigs.
“That’s a long ways off!” said the sheriff inconsequently.
They resumed their pilgrimage at a somewhat lessened pace; but at last
they could see the opening-up of the trees against the sky that marked
the hermit’s clearing.
“Hold up a second!” remarked the sheriff nervously. “Le’s decide about
this thing! Suppose you fellers with the guns go first--so’s to be all
ready--an’ then I’ll come right along----”
“Look here, Moses,” retorted one of the gunmen. “I ain’t got no
partic’lar objection to goin’ first, but you’re sheriff an’ I reckon
it’s up to you.”
Mr. Higgins hesitated. As Patriarch of the Sacred Camels it would not
do to permit any intimation of pusillanimity upon his part to get
abroad.
“Guess you’re right!” he remarked carelessly. “Gimme the gun.”
“What for?” demanded its owner. “You don’t need no gun to shoot a dead
man!”
“I know that ’s well as you do!” retorted the sheriff. “But wha’d you
bring a gun fer if there wasn’t no use fer it?--Le’s go up together!”
Thus reinforced the sheriff and his companion cautiously approached
the open door of the hermit’s shanty, on which the shadow of the ridge
had already fallen and was now slipping across the potato patch
towards the edge of the woods. On the threshold they paused. Then the
sheriff, swallowing, thrust in his head. It was so dark that at first
he could see only the face of the hermit’s old clock leering at him
out of the dusk. Then gradually he made out the crumpled bundle that
had been the hermit, lying in front of it. A grimy fist protruded from
beneath the covering. The sheriff bent over gingerly and took hold of
one corner of the comfortable. Then he withdrew his hand quickly. The
bedding had been lying upon the floor and was soaked in blood.
“God!” shrieked the sheriff and tottered out of the shanty.
“What’s th’ matter?” demanded Emerson rudely.
“There’s blood on everything--all over the place!” gasped Higgins.
“Well,--didn’t you look at him?” continued the lumberman brutally.
“I’m goin’ to, soon’s I kin git the blood off’n my hands!” returned
the sheriff valiantly.
He rubbed his fingers ostentatiously in the grass. Then he crept back
to the door of the shanty and looked in. The man with the gun poked
the comfortable off the hermit’s body.
“P’thah!” coughed the sheriff recoiling. “P’thah!--Somebody else
search that body--I can’t!”
He leaned heavily against the outside of the shanty and lowered his
head.
Nobody in Pottsville went to bed that night, and next day both local
clergymen preached rival sermons upon the text, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Also, although few of the inhabitants had taken the slightest interest
in the hermit during his life, except to deride him as a crank and a
drunkard, there was universal mourning for him now that he was dead;
for it was felt that in a way his presence in the Hollow had given a
certain distinction to the township which otherwise it would not have
had. It was a great moment for Pottsville. And so were the days
following during which the Grand Jury indicted Skinny for murder and
the case of “The People vs. James Hawkins” gradually built itself up,
block by block, “line upon, line,” “here a little and there a little,”
circumstance upon circumstance, until his guilt seemed established
beyond the utmost requirement of the law.
Then the gipsies, having weathered the rather superficial
investigation of the prosecutor, moved on to the “Sunny Southland” or
wherever it was that they were going, and six weeks later Local Lodge
No. 948 of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries convened at
Somerset Corners to debate whether the fact that James Hawkins was an
ex-member entitled him to pecuniary assistance for the purpose of
retaining counsel, upon the broad theory that once a Sacred Camel of
King Menelik--“always a camel.” For he had given the high-sign for
help and the Treasury of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides was
empty,--since the twenty shiny new five-dollar gold pieces which had
been found in Skinny’s pocket upon his arrest had been removed
therefrom and now reposed in the safe of the district attorney as
evidence against him.
Thus came opportunity to the door of Hezekiah Mason for the second
time; for in his widely heralded prosecution of Skinny the tramp, he
perceived “a stepping stone to higher things,”--not on his own “dead
self” but on the “dead selves” of Skinny and the hermit. Had not one
well-known public prosecutor, he told himself, leaped into the
gubernatorial saddle, and for a space held the reins of office, merely
because he had convicted a policeman of participating in the murder of
a gambler? Why should not he do the same for convicting a
distinguished tramp of the murder of a famous hermit? Indeed, who
shall quarrel with his logic?
“Tutt,” said Mr. Ephraim Tutt, of the well-known, if not celebrated,
law firm of Tutt & Tutt, on entering his office the morning after the
meeting of the Abyssinian Brothers, “kindly take a look at this!” And
he held out a night-letter telegram.
“Somerset Corners, N.Y.
“Tutt & Tutt, Attorneys-at-Law,
“61 Broadway, N. Y. City.
“Local Lodge Nine Hundred and Forty-eight, Abyssinian Brotherhood,
desires retain you to defend James Hawkins, otherwise known as Skinny
the Tramp, indicted for murder of Hermit of Turkey Hollow
twenty-seventh last May. Our resources limited to two hundred and
fifty dollars cash. Trial takes place next week. Kindly advise whether
you will accept retainer.
“Silas Higley,
“Grand Supreme Scribe, Sacred Camels of King Menelik, Brotherhood of
Abyssinian Mysteries.
“_Collect._”
“Well,” commented his sprightly partner, the lesser Tutt of the two,
“I observe that they prudently sent their invitation at our
expense.--You don’t seriously consider bothering with any legal junk
like that?”
Mr. Tutt paused in applying a match to the rat-tailed stogy which
drooped from his wrinkled lips.
“I wouldn’t miss it for a farm!” declared he. “A country murder
trial?--Why, it’ll be a regular vacation for me!”
“There be no money in it!” growled his junior partner. “And it’ll take
you a week.”
“Who asks money,” demanded Mr. Tutt, striking an heroic attitude,
“when innocence calls for succor? Could any true-hearted member of the
bar--if he had a trace of romance in his soul--refuse to defend a
prisoner known by ‘form and style’ as ‘Skinny the Tramp,’ especially
if he be charged with murdering a hermit, and still more particularly
if requested to do so by the Order of the Sacred Camels of King
Menelik, whose invitation is a command? What, may I ask, are hermits
for--but to be murdered?”
“You’re incorrigible!” sighed Tutt. “I suppose the whole office will
be depleted.”
“No--I’ll try the case alone!” replied his senior, “I’ll merely send
Bonnie Doon up there to look around a little and hear what my client
has to say for himself, and then I’ll go up a couple of days before
and examine the witnesses personally--I’ll have the time of my life.”
“Yes! And incidentally you’ll waste a week or ten days and end by
paying all the expenses of the trial yourself.--I know you!”
“Well, what else have I got to spend my money on?” retorted Mr. Tutt.
“I might as well spend it on keeping an innocent tramp out of the
electric chair as anything else!”
Now, as Tutt, the lesser, knew that Tutt, the greater, would
eventually do exactly as he chose, the argument then and there died;
and the up-to-date Mr. Bonwright Doon, that extraordinary combination
of law clerk, ambulance-chaser, detective and man-about-town who had
attached himself to the firm was at once despatched to Pottsville, as
Mr. Tutt’s _avant courier_, where he in due course interviewed Skinny
the Tramp in the calaboose, gave Squire Mason the “once-over,”
fraternized with Sheriff Higgins and his fat-boy deputy, Mr. Sam
Bellows, attended a Lodge Meeting of the Sacred Camels of which--as
well as of many similar organizations--he was a member, and after
spending but one night under the hospitable roof of the Phoenix House
won the lasting loyalty and friendship of “Ma” Barrows and of her
daughter Betty, aged nine, whose capacity for peanuts, popcorn,
ice-cream cones and bananas he demonstrated by actual test at Syracuse
to be equal to that of Ringling Bros.’ baby elephant.
Then, having spied out the lay of the land, he returned weighted with
information and wisdom, to make his report to Mr. Tutt,--a report by
no means rose-colored and yet not without hope.
“That town is certainly some hick!” declared the cosmopolitan Mr. Doon
a week later in making his official return. “It’s the variety of
metropolis where they regard an imported cigar as an immorality and
where the height of dissipation is an evening at a Custard Pie Comedy
with Fatty Arbuckle as custardee. It contained no male citizen in
Class 1-A, B or C under the recent draft, but it numbers among its
midst forty-one sacred camels--of which, you may recall, I am one.”
“H’m!” murmured Mr. Tutt, making a mental note.
“Yes!” agreed Bonnie, reading his mind. “Moreover, nothing of moment
has happened there since Artemas Ward gave his celebrated lecture on
‘Fools’ in the P. of H. hall in 1883. Hence this assassination has
naturally excited a heap big local pride. When this tramp-hermit case
comes to the bar there’s going to be such a Roman holiday as the
Mohawk Valley never saw. The rubes are all coming from miles around,
bringing the entire family with ’em and sufficient cold vittles to
last a week, and there’ll be overflow meetings all the way to Utica.”
“No doubt! No doubt!” mused his employer. “But what of my opponents?
What of the _dramatis personæ_ of the contest? And--what of my
client?”
“Your client is a childish nut,” responded Mr. Doon, “who devotes his
life to trying to find the pots of kale at the twin bases of the
rainbow’s arc. From my casual observation I should infer that he was a
trifle less harmless than a cottontail. He naturally asserts he didn’t
do it, and of course maybe he didn’t; but by heck! they’re going to
come awful close to proving it on him.”
“What’s the evidence?” inquired Mr. Tutt, leaning back in his swivel
chair and crossing his Congress shoes on Parker’s New York Criminal
Code which lay open at “Murder” upon his desk.
“All you want,” answered Bonnie cheerfully. “Defendant observed going
towards hermit’s hut a few minutes before the murder, tries to avoid
notice, cry and shot heard, witness bolts to cabin which he reaches in
three minutes and finds hermit dying with gold piece in his hand and a
broken bean-pot on floor beside him, defendant’s pipe left on table,
pursues murderer through woods in general direction of village but
can’t overtake him. Defendant walks into grocery store where all the
boobs are assembled waiting for the weekly shave--at four
o’clock--breathless, excited, blood on his hands--pursuing witness
arrives--also breathless--at four-fifteen and gives the alarm.
Defendant is arrested but when accused refuses to make any statement;
and, if that’s not enough,--his pockets turn out to be full of gold
pieces of the same vintage as the one in the hermit’s hand, and his
shoes fit the marks in the potato patch.--Q.E.D.”
“Did you say this is going to be a trial?” queried Mr. Tutt. “I should
say it was more likely to be an execution.”
“So would I,” assented Bonnie, except for a few minor details. “In the
first place the defendant is a harmless dreamer,--half-feckless fool,
half ‘boob,’ half philosopher and half----” he paused.
“Well?” commented his employer. “Half--what?”
Bonnie still hesitated rather sheepishly.
“Half-gentleman,” he declared in a slightly defiant tone.
Mr. Tutt smiled approvingly.
“Do they know it?” he asked.
“Oh, yes!” answered Bonnie. “But everybody likes a drink of blood
occasionally!”
“What are your other minor details?”
“The prosecutor is a crook--and I’ve got the goods on him.”
“What kind?” asked Mr. Tutt more cheerfully.
“Fifty-seven varieties!” affirmed the ambulance-chaser. “He sticks the
boobs for eighteen per cent on his loans, he sneaks up to Utica once
in three weeks by himself and gets hard boiled, and he looks like the
family portrait of Uncle Jonas Hardscrabble. Besides, although I don’t
know why I think so, I have a feeling he’s got some particular
personal animosity against our client.”
“H’h!” mused Mr. Tutt. “How about the sheriff?”
Bonnie grinned, as with meticulous elegance he removed a cigarette
from a golden case bearing his initials set in diamonds.
“He’s playing the constable in a b’gosh drama up on Broadway. Better
drop in and look him over. And he’s got a posse like the fire hose
company in Old Jed Prouty!”
Mr. Tutt shook his head regretfully.
“I don’t like your setting. The whole country will be
hell-bent-for-conviction on general principles. They’ll want to
vindicate their reputation for law and order and--if they’re in
doubt--instead of acquitting they’ll return a verdict of murder in the
second and rely on executive clemency to remedy any possible
injustice! I know ’em!”
“Mr. Tutt,” replied Bonnie with intense seriousness. “They’re going to
give you the fight of your life!”
Mr. Tutt fumbled in the coffin-like box on his desk for a stogy.
“I surmised as much!” he muttered. “I surmised as much. But--you never
can tell!”
He lit the stogy meditatively and gazed out of the office window
through half-lowered lids.
“You say the prisoner entered the drug store at four o’clock exactly?”
“Yes--that’s absolutely fixed.”
“And his pursuer at fifteen minutes past?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Tutt pursed his lips.
“How far did they have to run?”
“About a mile.”
The old lawyer made a rapid calculation.
“And what time was the murder committed?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” replied the clerk. “I had no way to find out.”
“Well,” said Mr. Tutt, bringing his feet to the floor with a bang.
“That’s what we’ve got to find out. The whole case turns on it. If our
client fired the shot that killed the hermit and it took the witness
three minutes to reach the shanty and--say--a couple of minutes more
to look around there--then the defendant must have increased his five
minute start to fifteen minutes in a single mile--and if the other man
was running hard I don’t believe he could have done it! No, sir!--He’s
not guilty!”
“And then--there’s the Sacred Camels of King Menelik!” mused Bonnie.
“_And the sheriff is head camel!_”
II
When Lawyer Ephraim Tutt arrived in Pottsville to conduct the
defense of Skinny the Tramp for the murder of the Hermit of Turkey
Hollow, having been retained to that end by the local order of the
Sacred Camels of King Menelik, he found the whole town up and waiting
for him. Having with his customary equanimity deposited his bag at the
Phoenix House and eaten his dinner, he strolled into the kitchen and,
as was his wont, endeavored to gain some knowledge of local color,
politics and personalities, including that of the client for whose
life he was responsible, by engaging genial “Ma” Best, the
proprietress, in conversation.
“Why, bless your heart, Mr. Tutt!” she assured him after she had wiped
her hands upon her apron and invited him to a seat in the broken-down
rocker beside the wood box, “there ain’t no gentler, kinder soul than
Skinny in the whole county! I’ve known him all his life and his ma
afore him. He’s just a pore, harmless critter that wouldn’t hurt a
fly. Many’s the time I’ve seen him put a baby bird back into the nest
that had fallen out. O’ course he’s kind o’ weak in the upper
story--but he ain’t crazy by a long shock, an’ there’s some things he
knows a lot more about ’n most folks.”
“Will you testify as a witness to his good reputation?” asked Mr.
Tutt.
“Indeed I will!” she declared warmly. “And so’ll half the people in
Pottsville--the children, anyways! Now what would you like for your
supper?--Griddle cakes?”
* * * * * *
Those of our readers who have journeyed from London down to Epsom on
race day may be able to form some notion of the condition of affairs
in the environs of Pottsville upon the opening morning of the trial of
Skinny the Tramp. Long before the light of the stars had paled before
the coming dawn--e’en before the glowworm had bid the matin to be
near--lanterns flickered in the doorways of distant barns and bobbed
down country roads beneath the bouncing axles of antique buggies and
carry-alls bearing the sleepless inhabitants of the Mohawk Valley to
the legal colosseum of Somerset County. By sunrise Main Street was one
long line of flivvers, while the race track recently occupied by the
Zingara Gipsies was crowded with every variety of antediluvian vehicle
of locomotion,--parked axle to axle.
When at eight o’clock Sheriff Higgins unlocked the door of the court
house the stampede which followed filled every bench in less than
thirty seconds. Competition for the pleasurable and exciting privilege
of sitting upon the jury was keen and the box having been quickly
filled by eleven o’clock, old Judge Tompkins was able to direct the
prosecutor to open his case.
“Silence in the court room!” cautioned the sheriff pompously. “Silence
in the court!--All them folks as wants to go out--git out now--or set
still!”
This invitation being disingenuous and not meant to be taken seriously
since obviously nobody wished to withdraw,--there being, on the
contrary, by actual count three hundred and sixty-one persons packed
against the outside of the door who were anxious to get in,--everybody
accordingly sat still,--except for that slow, uniform, rhythmical
facial movement which now characterizes the entire American nation
while viewing any spectacle. Sheriff Higgins thereupon sat down
heavily himself, by so doing seeming coincidently to elevate Squire
Mason, as upon the other end of the seesaw of public attention. The
trial was on in earnest,--the biggest event in the Mohawk since Abe
Lincoln showed himself on the back platform of his train when he came
through on his way to Washington in 1861. Some of the old codgers who
had seen him then--as little boys--were even sitting in the court room
now,--and more than one commented on the striking resemblance between
him and Lawyer Tutt.
And now Squire Mason, in a new, light blue, broadcloth suit, bowed to
Judge Tompkins, wiped his massive forehead with a parti-colored
handkerchief, took an ostentatious sip from the discolored glass of
water upon the deal table in front of him, replaced it carefully, shot
a defiant and contemptuous glance in the direction where Skinny the
Tramp sat with Mr. Tutt, cleared his throat, and having thus, by
convolutions only somewhat less complicated than those of a Bush
League pitcher but serving much the same purpose, given due notice
that he was about to deliver the ball and that everybody had better
look,--Squire Mason, we say, began his great opening address to the
gentlemen-farmers of the jury who had in their keeping the life of
Skinny the Tramp.
Having first outlined the entire history of the law of homicide
beginning with the well-known Cain-Abel murder in 4000 B.C. he
proceeded, by vocal stages of approximately twenty parasangs each,
through the pages of Holy Writ, not excluding the Apochrypha,--and
referring specifically to both the Judith-Holofernes and the
Jael-Sisera cases,--touched briefly upon the lex talionis, the Salic
law, and the development of the ecclesiastical courts,--and finally
burst into the full flower of rhetoric along with the abolition of
benefit of clergy in 1825. As a symposium of miscellaneous penological
information it was something very fine indeed,--although it had
nothing to do with Skinny the Tramp or the Hermit of Turkey
Hollow,--and the jury, hardened by generations of country sermons--not
only accepted it as their due but drank it all in with rapturous
delight. And at length--as befitted its importance both to the jury
and to him--the Squire came to the matter in hand and that is where
this story really only begins,--the story of the fight for a human
life.
Some time on the afternoon of Saturday, May twenty-seventh last,
declared the Squire, an innocent, helpless old recluse was shot to
death in his shanty in Turkey Hollow. Obviously robbery had been the
motive, since the dead man still clutched in his hand a piece of gold
and upon the floor lay a shattered earthen receptacle which had
doubtless contained others. There were only two persons known to be
anywhere in the neighborhood at the time, James Hawkins, alias Skinny
the Tramp,--the prisoner at the bar,--and Emerson, the lumberman who
had been cutting pea sticks in the Hollow, who had heard the shot and
had hurried at once to the scene of the murder and later given the
alarm. The squire here paused for increased emphasis.
However, he remarked, the murderer, like most murderers fortunately,
had not made his escape without leaving the evidences of his identity
behind him. Not only had he left his pipe, but fresh in the rich earth
of the hermit’s potato patch were the prints of a heavy pair of boots,
the soles of which were thickly studded with nails. He would in due
course exhibit to them an enlarged photograph of said footprints taken
on the very afternoon of the crime by Mr. Pennypacker, who ran the
gallery over to Somerset Corners. Again he paused significantly, and
looked at Skinny the Tramp.
Who, he asked, had worn those fatal boots? Whose guilty feet had left
those telltale prints? The same person, he answered dramatically, who
at four o’clock had stumbled, disheveled, out of breath and
blood-stained, into Colson’s Grocery and called for a bottle of root
beer that Saturday afternoon--and in whose pockets had been discovered
the balance of the gold pieces representing the hermit’s hoard--the
defendant!
A murmur in which were blended astonishment, horror and admiration
arose from the crowded benches, showing that for the first time the
audience realized the gravity of what was going on,--that not only an
innocent man had been killed but that there was sitting within reach
of their fingers the man who had killed him and whom the law now
sought to kill in return. Beneath the table Mr. Tutt patted the knee
of Skinny the Tramp, indicating a confidence which he by no means
felt.
Then the prosecutor proceeded to drive a few more nails in Skinny’s
coffin. When the defendant had been arrested, he informed the jury,
the latter declined to make any statement, either of explanation or of
denial, in his own behalf. He had simply stood mute, giving by his
trembling limbs, his averted eyes and the chalk-like color of his
face, every evidence of a guilty conscience. Then Mason told the jury
with an air of melancholy how he hated to be compelled to prosecute
any human being for a crime--much more for a murder--but that it was
his solemn, sworn duty to do so, just as it would be theirs under the
circumstances to convict; and--called Charlie Emerson to the witness
chair.
If, at this point, the reader should begin to speculate as to what, if
any, is the underlying purpose of this story, let us hasten to state
that its object is to demonstrate that sometimes the trial of an
action in court under our rules of evidence is less a search for the
truth than it is a game of legal chess.
There are two lessons to be drawn from the case of Skinny the Tramp.
The first is, that the trial-lawyer, like the general, must be ready
instantly to change his tactics to meet new situations as they arise,
and that the prosecutor or attorney for the defense who goes into
court with a hidebound theory as to his case is apt to leave his own
hide behind him neatly hammered to the court room wall. He should
realize that the whole actual truth concerning any human happening is
never known, being never learned in court because the witnesses,
well-meaning though they be, are human,--fallible as to observation,
memory and the power to express their recollection of what they think
they originally saw and heard. In a word, the real or absolute truth
is never the legal truth, and as what the legal truth under the
technical rules of procedure is going to turn out to be can rarely be
foreseen it is usually idle to speculate much about it. Therefore, he
should go boldly into court, listen calmly while the witnesses on both
sides tell their widely divergent stories, and then--and not until
then--devise the theory upon which he may excusably demand judgment
for his client or the acquittal of the prisoner. This requires, to be
sure, self-control, ingenuity and audacity; the restraint of a Foch
awaiting the precise moment to counter-attack; the self-trust which
the philosopher Emerson says is the essence of heroism.
But Mr. Tutt knew well that the expected never occurs,--except when
the expected is the unexpected. Thus he always went into a trial with
an entirely open mind,--committed to no hypothesis,--and ready to go
to the mat in a catch-as-catch-can on law or fact, or--to run like a
jack-rabbit. The unknown quantity was both what he dreaded and also
what he gambled on. He was an opportunist of opportunists, on the
alert to snatch victory out of defeat, making shining virtues out of
adroitly concealed necessities, scrambling to his feet with a benign
smile just as he was about to be counted out. The only generality to
which he subscribed was, “You never can tell!” In a word, Mr. Tutt had
a high confidence in his own star, and as he never acknowledged
defeat, nobody ever knew when he was beaten, an adverse verdict being
to him only the starting point for a renewal of the battle in which he
had, at least, an even chance of outwitting his antagonist. He held
that the best preparation for a day in court was a sound sleep the
night before, an hour’s exercise, and a hearty breakfast followed by
what he called a Wheeling Corona-Corona. But not all of us have the
equipoise of Ephraim Tutt.
Now, the other lesson to be deduced from the trial of Skinny the Tramp
was that the best rule in examining witnesses is to have no rule at
all,--which is very much the same thing as “You never can tell!” There
is no more any hard and fast rule for the examination of a witness
than there is for arguing with your stepmother. It “all depends.” The
lawyer who says that you must never let a witness leave the stand
without exhausting his information is just as wide of the mark as he
who claims that the only safe cross-examination is no
cross-examination and that the best cross-examiner is he who does not
cross-examine at all. Yet “no generality is true,--not even this one,”
as the French say; the fact of the matter being that cross-examination
is obviously a dangerous weapon, usually resulting in more harm than
good--but not always, and that every witness presents a new and
special problem which can only be solved by a subtle and perhaps
instinctive appreciation of his psychology. Generally speaking, it is
a pretty safe plan to ask no questions of a witness who has not harmed
your side of the case, for if you cross-examine you may bring out
something entirely unexpected to your great and everlasting detriment.
“Leave well enough alone.” That is the path of prudence--and yet--not
always! But let us not anticipate.
Emerson, the lumberman, like many another man of limited education, in
addition to an astonishingly accurate memory for detail, showed
himself to have a gift for picturesque description which made him a
graphic and convincing witness for the prosecution. He was obviously
unbiased, absolutely clear, positive in all his statements, and
careful,--as both the judge and the prosecutor took pains to instruct
him to be,--to answer only the exact questions put to him.
This, of course, is the regular and proper rule, for if a witness is
permitted to volunteer testimony he is almost certain to violate every
rule of evidence within the first thirty seconds. But in the case of
Emerson there was a particular and vital reason for such a caution on
the part of the prosecutor which was known only to him, namely, that
for tactical reasons it was imperative that certain features of his
testimony should be suppressed.
Now it is the general rule of the law that the lawyer who calls a
witness to the stand in the first place vouches for his integrity and,
in the second, commits himself and his case to the truth of the
proposition of fact that the witness is called to substantiate. But
there is a qualification upon this rule, which is that technically the
lawyer is bound by his own witness only upon those subjects upon which
he sees fit to examine him; and, if later, his adversary brings out
from the same witness new facts upon other subjects, the lawyer who
originally called him may attack the witness as hostile, discredit him
as to those facts, and controvert them if he can.
Yet, underlying all rules is the universal principle of sound ethics
and common decency which hold true both in law and in life as a whole,
that we must conduct ourselves at all times and places as gentlemen
and sportsmen, whether in court or outdoors, until we join the choir
invisible and have no longer any moral problems. In other words, the
lawyer has got to play his game fairly and if, on the one hand, he
calls a witness to prove a certain fact knowing that the witness is
mistaken, or, on the other hand, knowing that his witness is telling
the truth about a certain fact induces the jury or the judge to
believe that the witness is mistaken, that man is a liar, a cad and a
shyster and ought to be disbarred.
Now, Squire Mason was up against a most unfortunate, tantalizing and
exasperating situation with regard to this, his principal witness,
which was that although Emerson had taken only a few minutes to reach
the hermit’s shanty after hearing the fatal shot, and had lingered
there but a minute or two more and had then hurried hot foot to
Pottsville, arriving there within fifteen minutes of the time Skinny
also reached town, which is to say, considering that the murderer had
at least a five minute start, almost at his heels,--nevertheless, and
this is the crux of the case, he was prepared to state definitely and
unequivocally, if asked the time at which he found the hermit dying,
that it was four o’clock exactly--which as we know, and Squire Mason
also perfectly well knew, was the precise moment at which the tramp
entered Colson’s grocery store a full mile away. If this were true,
then James Hawkins, no matter how strongly circumstances pointed
towards him as the murderer, could not be guilty.
Thus, if District Attorney Mason should elicit “the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth” from Emerson,--which was what he was
in duty bound to do and what Emerson had sworn to tell,--the
prosecution would establish a perfect alibi for the defendant from the
lips of its own chief witness. Therefore Mason had resolved to refrain
from asking the lumberman any question bearing upon the time of the
homicide, and in order that no one else might suspect what Emerson
might be able, if questioned, to say upon this important topic, had
slipped him twenty-five dollars and instructed him that the interests
of the public--particularly that of the Mohawk Valley--demanded that
he should absent himself from his customary haunts until he should be
needed at the trial.
Of all this, naturally, Mr. Tutt was wholly ignorant and he had come
to Pottsville with no other defense than the rather shaky argument
that Skinny could not have fired the shot that killed the hermit and,
with only a five minute start, have increased his lead over the
pursuing Emerson to fifteen whole minutes in a single mile. It had,
according to his theory, taken the lumberman only three minutes to
reach the shanty after hearing the shot, and he was out of the place
again and hot on the murderer’s trail in two minutes more. That meant
that he was only five minutes behind when he started in pursuit. Now,
as Mr. Tutt was going to claim, a man could run a mile in less than
ten minutes, and hence it was manifestly impossible that Skinny could
have reached Pottsville fifteen minutes ahead of Emerson--if he were
guilty.
This plausible--but distinctly Tuttian--argument depended, however,
entirely upon the assumption that Emerson did not take more than three
minutes to get to the shanty after hearing the shot, did not stay in
its vicinity for more than a couple more, and had run at top
speed--without pause--all the way to Pottsville,--assumptions that had
little to sustain them, and had small appeal compared with the
overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence that pointed to the tramp
as the murderer. Mr. Tutt realized full well that his defense was a
flimsy one, since in all probability Emerson had been fully fifteen
minutes behind the fleeing assassin when he had started for the town
and at best had probably done no more than hold his distance, if
indeed he had succeeded in doing that. Yet, although so far as Mr.
Tutt was aware, this ephemeral syllogism was all that stood between
his client and the electric chair, nevertheless, and had he only known
it,--according to Emerson’s full story related privately to
Mason,--Skinny had an iron-clad, copper-fastened, dyed-in-the-wool,
unimpeachable and perfect alibi. It was this full story--the “whole
truth”--that Mason now set himself to conceal in the hope that it
would never be known, for as long as the exact time of the murder
could be left vague and undetermined the alibi would be valueless. So
the shifty Squire carefully omitted to ask the lumberman any question
as to the hour except when it was that he had started in to cut his
pea sticks,--which had been two o’clock.
“There had been a smart shower,” said he, “and some thunder--but the
sun had come out real bright agin. I was about three hundred yards
from where the hermit lived--most through with my job--I’d cut a
hundred sticks and I only wanted a hundred and a half--when I heard a
holler from the direction of the house follered by a shot.”
“Yes.--Go on!” directed Squire Mason ominously.
“I run over there as fast as I could. The door was open. I called out
but got no answer, so I went in. The shanty was hot--for the winders
were closed--and it was sort o’ dim in there--and then I hearn a kind
of cluckin’ sound and I see the hermit lyin’ on the floor--he had
toppled over on his back--and the blood was frothin’ out of his mouth
where he was tryin’ to breathe.”
“Proceed,” said the court. “What else did you observe?”
“I stepped over to where he was lyin’ an’ lifted up his head so’s to
look in his face. I remember there was a great big moth flappin’ like
mad inside the window. It skeart me. Then all of a sudden the hermit
stopped breathin’--the moth flew out the door--and I knew he was
dead--murdered.”
“Do you object to the word ‘murdered,’ Mr. Tutt?” inquired the court.
“No, your Honor,” replied the old lawyer. “The poor man was
undoubtedly murdered.”
“Very well, go on,” continued Judge Tompkins to the witness.
“I threw somethin’ over him and looked ’round for a second or two.
There was a busted bean pot lyin’ under the table and I noticed the
hermit had a gold piece clutched in his fist. The rest of the shanty
looked same as usual.--So I ran right out and listened. I could hear
some one crashing through the brush and I followed after towards the
town, but he beat me to it.”
The court room was as still as the hermit’s death chamber.
“Did you see any footprints in the garden patch?” asked Squire Mason.
“I did. Sure. An’ I showed ’em both to the sheriff and to Mr.
Pennypacker, the photographer.”
“When you went back there with Sheriff Higgins and Mr. Pennypacker was
everything in and around the shanty the same as when you were there
the first time?” asked Mason.
“Just the same. No one else had been there,” declared Emerson.
“That is all!” announced the prosecutor in a tone of triumph. “You may
cross-examine, Mr. Tutt.”
Mr. Tutt did not immediately arise to his feet. It was of course
obvious to him that Mason had refrained from eliciting the time of the
murder from Emerson. Time and place were the inevitable bases of all
testimony. Why had he done so? It was conceivable that the witness was
entirely at sea about the time and hence that his evidence regarding
it, if given, would have been of no value. That was more than
probable, in which case it was natural enough that the district
attorney should not have gone into the matter at all. But there was
also--Mr. Tutt recognized--another possibility, so remote as to be
almost theoretical,--that Emerson did know the time at which he
entered the shanty and that Mason was deliberately holding it back. If
this were so he was doing it for a reason and what reason could there
be?
Mr. Tutt was face to face with one of the greatest dilemmas of his
life: if Emerson knew the time of the shot and it was such as to give
Skinny time to have fired it and reach the village by four o’clock,
that fact, if he brought it out, would be of inestimable damage to
him,--but, if by any chance--oh, could it be!--that the shot was fired
so close to four as to make it unlikely or impossible that Skinny
could have fired it and yet arrive at Colson’s at four, the answer
might acquit him! “The Lady or the Tiger”! Which was it? Mr. Tutt
thought hard. Was Mason concealing the time, or was he luring his
adversary into a trap? For, if Mr. Tutt himself adduced the fact that
the murder occurred, say, at a quarter to four his client would be
doubly damned. A bit of supposedly unexpected evidence elicited on
cross-examination by a party to whom it is harmful is invariably more
damaging than if brought out by the party who has called the witness
in the first place. On the one hand it was a great temptation for Mr.
Tutt to waive the witness from the stand with a nonchalant, “No
questions!” as if his testimony contained nothing damaging to the
defense; but on the other it might be his last chance of proving even
the approximate time of the murder. Sly old dog that he was, he
resolved to try to steal whatever advantage might lie in both courses.
So, without getting up, he waved his hand towards the window and
remarked in the most casual manner possible:
“No questions.--Thank you, Mr. Emerson, for your very vivid word
picture!” And he busied himself with his papers.
Then, as the witness was about to descend from the platform, he looked
up hastily and said in a tone of apology:
“I beg your pardon. I forget whether you happened to mention the hour
at which you visited the shanty the first time.”
Emerson smiled. Without taking his seat he answered:
“No, I didn’t mention it.”
“Do you know?”
“Yes.”
“What time was it?”
Emerson turned to the jury who were leaning forward expectantly.
“When I lifted the hermit’s head in my hand I was lookin’ straight
into the face of that old clock of his that stands between the two
windows in the back--and it was just four o’clock.”
“Thanks,” remarked Mr. Tutt quietly, as if the reply held no
particular significance for his client, whom in fact it might well
save. “No other questions.”
The judge glanced at Squire Mason.
“Have you anything further, Mr. District Attorney?”
“No--I have no further questions,” replied the prosecutor, also as if
the matter was not of the slightest moment.
“May I go, your honor?” asked Emerson.
“Yes,--if these gentlemen are through with you,” smiled Judge
Tompkins.
As neither of the gentlemen wished or dared to ask him the fraction of
another question Mr. Emerson forthwith was given leave to depart upon
his business,--which unbeknown to any of them was to take a job as
foreman in a steam lumber mill seventy miles distant, the train for
which bore him thither later that afternoon.
Mr. Tutt settled back in his chair, a heavenly calm descending upon
his previously agonized spirit. Skinny had been snatched from the very
jaws of death. There was nothing to worry about any longer. Skinny the
Tramp couldn’t have been in two places at once, no matter how strong
the evidence against him might be.
Evidently the Squire was a good bluffer. It required real nerve to be
as placid as all that in the face of such a body blow! The prosecutor
took a sip of water, pushed a mass of papers away from him, leaned
over and picked up a large diagram of the clearing, including the
hermit’s shanty drawn to scale. It had been artistically done and
contained no objectionable matter, the location of the body not having
been marked at all, and the various pieces of furniture appearing only
in outline. Next to the cot-bed the most conspicuous object in the
place had plainly been the hermit’s clock.
Squire Mason handed the diagram to Mr. Tutt with stately bucolic
courtesy.
“Any objection to my puttin’ in this here diagram?” he inquired.
Mr. Tutt smiled as he glanced over it.
“_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!_” he replied. Then observing the look
of bewilderment upon the prosecutor’s face, he added: “None whatever!
It can be admitted so far as I am concerned, subject, of course, to
correction. Who made it?”
“Miss Gookin,” replied Mason.
“Then I heartily congratulate Miss Gookin on her artistic work!” said
Mr. Tutt, thus making sure of at least one vote, if ever he should run
for governor, from “Toggery Bill,” her father, and gaining high favor
with Mr. Soper, juror Number Eight, who was seeking the lady’s hand in
marriage.
“All right, then--mark it!” said Hezekiah to the stenographer. “Now,
sheriff! Take the stand!”
Just as the prosecution of Skinny the Tramp marked the peak of Squire
Mason’s professional career, so his appearance as a witness at that
same trial was the greatest event in the official experience of
Sheriff Higgins. Being a quiet, home-loving citizen, the Supreme
Exalted Ruler of the Sacred Camels had experienced few of the joys of
publicity and now to be able to ascend the rostrum and, with a real
reporter sent over special from Utiky taking down every word that fell
from his lips, to recount the thrilling narrative of how he had
captured Skinny the Tramp and later secured the evidence against him
through a personal visit to the scene of the homicide while the body
was still warm, to sit elevated high in the court room upon a level
with the judge himself, to feel in his own opinion that he was the
most important figure among the _dramatis personæ_, and that the eyes
and ears of all waited upon him--ah! who that has not had a similar
experience can have the faintest realization of its ecstasy?
Now Sheriff Higgins had looked forward to his coming testimony with
great satisfaction, not only for the reasons just stated, but also
because it would give him an opportunity to indicate publicly what
small potatoes he thought Squire Mason to be. He was in the delightful
position of being able at one and the same time to gratify his vanity,
to do his full duty to the state and also to savor the full venom of
his hatred for an ancient enemy. He proposed to do each in turn and to
do it thoroughly and well, but he was in a somewhat delicate and
paradoxical situation. He had collected the evidence against Skinny,
and was one of the chief witnesses against him; he acknowledged that
logically there was no escape from the conclusion that the tramp was
the guilty party; he was the mainstay of the law in that county and it
was up to him to see that the murderer was convicted; and yet--he
didn’t believe Skinny had done it! No, sir! And the reason was simply
that the tramp wasn’t that kind of a feller, and he and half a dozen
other Sacred Camels were ready--if asked--to say so.
But first, approaching his various phases in order, let us take up the
sheriff’s innocent gratification of his own vanity--in which he
differed not a whit from ninety-nine out of every hundred witnesses.
It is a noticeable thing that once a man finds himself the cynosure of
public attention he feels obliged to picture himself as of heroic
mould. Has any witness since the Creation--we wonder--in any court of
law ever admitted--unless his questioner had the goods on him and he
knew it--that he was in any degree stupid, unscrupulous, negligent,
timid or even slightly impolite or uncultivated? We have never met
one. It cannot be mere boastfulness or vainglory that leads each man,
who kisses the Book and gazes upon the carping features of the jury,
to try and make them believe him the highest type of citizen. He isn’t
and he knows it; and he knows they know he knows it, and yet he will
thrust forth his chest and assume for the nonce to possess every
virtue in the calendar while modestly protesting that there may be
others as good or as brave as he.
We have heard otherwise apparently sensible men confess under oath
without trace of embarrassment, one that he was regarded as the
handsomest man in Rochester, N.Y., another that he was the greatest
mechanical genius in the world, another that he would back his own
opinion on any given subject against that of any ten men and stick to
it even if proven mathematically to be mistaken, another that he had
never told a lie or been guilty of any sort of misleading statement in
his life, another that he had never consciously done anything wrong,
another that he had read every book worth reading in the English
language--and answered categorically “Yes” to some six hundred
separate works such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--and one, who may have been
telling the truth, that he had never kissed, or been kissed by, a
member of the opposite sex.
The sheriff wasn’t as bad as any of these, but now that it was all
over, his recollection as to his own conduct and demeanor differed
radically from that of his associates at the time. He honestly thought
that he had done things which in fact had been done by others. Anyhow,
someone had done them, so what difference did it make? While,
therefore, the substance of his testimony--as with most witnesses--was
based on fact, the details bore no resemblance whatever to the truth.
As the reader knows, the barber had received Skinny’s surrender, yet
the sheriff unhesitatingly swore that he had reduced him into
possession; the proprietor of the Mohawk Palace Theatre had searched
the tramp and found the twenty five-dollar gold pieces, yet Higgins
managed to give the impression that it was he, and not Mr. Perkins,
who had discovered them; as the reader knows, he had been scared out
of his seven senses when he visited the hermit’s shanty and had
refused to touch the body, and he now was obviously under the firm
impression that he had walked boldly in, uncovered the corpse,
searched the clothes upon it, inventoried the furniture and in general
conducted himself with the brilliant audacity of one of Dumas’ heroes
and the astuteness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes; which, to tell the truth
nobody would have minded in the slightest degree, least of all Mr.
Tutt, for the slab-sided old sheriff was a good old scout, a deacon in
the Baptist congregation, as well as the leading Sacred Camel in that
part of the Mohawk--had it not been for what Squire Mason regarded as
his deliberate act of treachery in giving Skinny a good character--all
of which we will set down in due course. By the time he was called to
the stand Mose Higgins was almost of the same mind as the Sheriff of
Nottingham in the opera of Robin Hood when he said
“You may search aye,
But you never will descry
Such a wonderful man as I!
. . . . .
I never yet made one mistake!
I’d like to--for variety’s sake!”
. . . . .
So in full glory he described first the pursuit and final capture of
Skinny and how he had found his pockets full of the hermit’s gold--the
pieces all dated 1910--shining, lustrous, five-dollar pieces--of
exactly the right sort to make the mouth of any tramp water; then how
the prisoner had positively declined to say a word in defense or
extenuation; and then, warming to his subject, he gave a vivid picture
of his visit to the shanty just at nightfall and how he had discovered
the hermit lying in his gore, with another--the last!--gold piece
clutched tight in his left hand--also dated 1910, Skinny’s pipe upon
the table, and the marks of fresh footprints in the potato patch. It
was all clear as a bell and he figured largely in his own account as
rather a dashing, nervy sort of sleuth who knew just what to do and
had done it.
Squire Mason, well satisfied, turned him over to Mr. Tutt with a
gesture of “now-go-ahead-and-do-your-damnedest!” Now, Mr. Tutt’s
damnedest in this particular instance was not spectacular, but he
nevertheless elicited more than one fact that played an important part
in the denouement of the trial. He knew that the sheriff was friendly
and also was a Sacred Camel, but he also knew that he was an honest
public officer even if he gave himself a little the best end of it.
“Sheriff Higgins,” said he, approaching obliquely what might be called
the “time element” in the case. “What hour was it when you and your
posse left Pottsville for the scene of the crime?”
The sheriff pondered.
“About quarter past five,” he answered.
_Q._ “And how long did it take you to reach Turkey Hollow?”
_A._ “I should say about half an hour--carryin’ the camera and all.”
_Q._ “Was it light when you reached the shanty?”
Now the darker the sheriff made it the greater impression of bravery
would he create upon his auditors.
_A._ “It was gettin’ along towards six--and there wasn’t much light.
Inside, it was pretty dark!”
_Q._ “Was there a clock in the shanty?”
_A._ “Yes.”
_Q._ “Did you notice the time?”
The sheriff hesitated.
“To tell ye the truth,” he confessed with apparent frankness,
“although I’m positive sure I looked at it--must have!--I didn’t get
no real idee o’ the time.”
That helped Mr. Tutt not a whit, so he veered off on another tack.
_Q._ “Rather a gristly scene, wasn’t it?”
One would have said that Sheriff Higgins thought the examination of
dead bodies a pleasant form of light entertainment.
_A._ “Not partic’ly,” he answered casually.
_Q._ “Did you search the body?”
_A._ “Oh, yes--natur’ly.”
_Q._ “What did you find?”
Sheriff Higgins removed with deliberation from his vest pocket a cheap
memorandum book--evidently a recent acquisition--with cardboard
covers, the edges dyed a bright blue. On the outside in letters of
gigantic script appeared the words “Don’t Forget!”
Running his thumb through the leaves, he opened it at the right place,
adjusted his spectacles, cleared his throat and read in an aggressive,
declamatory tone:
_A._ “One fish hook--one copper cent--one piece of string--two loose
buttons--nine cloves--”
_Q._ “What was that?”
_A._ “Cloves--nine cloves----”
_Q._ “Go on!”
_A._ “--one tobacco pouch--five matches--one pipe--one jackknife--one
piece of gum--one piece wax--one nail--one bottle of whiskey--one
smaller bottle of whiskey--one cork, extra--a handkerchief--eleven
large pins--one pencil end----”
_Q._ “Anything else?”
_A._ “And one hundred dollars in bills.”
_Q._ “Is that all?”
_A._ “Absolutely.”
The sheriff closed his book and returned it to his pocket. Clearly
there was nothing in this catalogue to shed any light on the nature of
the murder, except possibly to indicate that the assassin had been in
too much of a hurry to search his victim, which was not a fact
favorable to the defense. So Mr. Tutt moved on to the potato patch.
Here, as all admitted, the sheriff had done some slick work. He had
carefully measured the footprints and then protected them from
disturbance with a low wire fence. The earth had been soft and squashy
and each one had been as distinct as a fossil in the museum. He had
brought along one of Skinny’s boots and it fitted into each print
exactly! Even the broken down heel was perfectly reproduced. There was
nothing to be done about it so Mr. Tutt handed the sheriff a few large
bouquets to put him in a good humor. Then he asked:
_Q._ “Known my client for some time, have you, sheriff?”
_A._ “Since he was a boy.”
_Q._ “Does he come from around here?”
_A._ “Yes. He was born over Holbrook way.”
_Q._ “Parents living?”
_A._ “No--he’s an orphan.”
_Q._ “Do you know his reputation for honesty, peace and quiet?”
“Look here!” interjected Squire Mason. “You’re makin’ the sheriff your
own witness.”
“I’m perfectly well aware of that!” replied Mr. Tutt calmly.
_A._ “I do.”
_Q._ “What is it?”
The sheriff looked round the room slowly as if to call those present
to corroborate him.
_A._ “There ain’t a quieter, honester, more law-abidin’ citizen in
this here county than Skinny Hawkins,” said he with conviction.
_Q._ “Ever know him to do an unkind act?”
“I object!” shouted the Squire, springing to his feet. “That ain’t
proper and you know it.”
Judge Tompkins smiled indulgently.
“Oh, I’ll give Mr. Tutt some latitude. It’s a serious case!” said he.
_A._ “No,” answered the sheriff. “I never did. He’s got a real kind
heart. He wouldn’t kill a grasshopper!”
Mr. Tutt bowed.
“Thank you kindly, sheriff!” he remarked. “That is all!”
Now Squire Mason had heard this testimony with rising indignation.
Moreover, his rejection as an Abyssinian Brother by the Order of the
Sacred Camels of King Menelik rankled in his bosom. And he did not
propose to let the sheriff get away with anything like that.
“Hold on a minute!” he cried, as Mr. Higgins prepared to descend from
the chair. “You’re sheriff of this county, ain’t you?”
“I be!” retorted the witness. “That is, I was a minute ago an’ if
nothin’ ain’t happened since----”
“It’s your business to get th’ evidence agin’ criminals and convict
’em, ain’t it?” snapped the squire.
“If I think they’re guilty,” answered the sheriff.
“None of your business to try to help ’em, is it?”
“I ain’t tried to help nobody!” shot back the sheriff indignantly.
“I’ve done my duty in this case better’n most!”
“Brave feller, ain’t ye?” said the Squire with scorn.
“Brave as you be, I guess!” countered his adversary.
The judge, Mr. Tutt and the jury were all enjoying the sideshow.
“Ain’t it a fact you was so skeart when you went to the shanty you ran
out and was sick? An’ wouldn’t go back?”
Sheriff Higgins stood up and waved his long arms, almost speechless
with rage.
“It’s a gol-durned lie!” he shouted. “Who told ye that, I’d like to
know?”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” cautioned his honor. “The personal courage of
this officer is not an issue. Call your next witness, Mr. District
Attorney.”
It was true that Mr. Tutt had not scored heavily since he had failed
in his most important attempt--that is, to corroborate through the
sheriff’s testimony the general accuracy of the hermit’s timepiece,
but he had at least secured an official recommendation for Skinny’s
character and he had got Squire Mason quarreling with one of his
principal witnesses. That was a good deal. Incidentally, although it
got by him at the moment, he had gained something else, the importance
of which did not appear until later. Still, nothing made any real
difference, one way or another, so long as he had a perfect alibi for
Skinny safely tucked away in his sleeve. In the feeling of confidence
engendered by this knowledge--and in the delight of having set the
prosecutor at logger heads with the sheriff--Mr. Tutt’s spirits rose
to such a degree that he became positively playful--as light-hearted
as a colt loosed in a clover-field. Alas that legal pride is so often
doomed to fall! That the happiness of one moment in the court room is
so often the despair of the next! Alas for the colt who feels his
oats--for he is sure to kick himself into some sort of a tangle!
Mr. Tutt pleased as Punch with the case, chatted gaily with the jury
and assured Skinny that he would have him out and walking the street
in forty-eight hours--a free man. So elated was he that he gave only
perfunctory attention to the prosecution’s other witnesses, until the
boots worn by the defendant when arrested were put in evidence and Mr.
Pennypacker was called to identify his photographic enlargement of the
footprints in the hermit’s vegetable patch. No, there wasn’t the
shadow of a doubt about it--they were Skinny’s footprints! Yet,
however interesting that fact might seem to the jury, Mr. Tutt rested
secure in the knowledge that his client must have been far away from
there when the hermit had been killed.
Mr. Pennypacker seemed a pleasant sort of person and Mr. Tutt having
nothing better to do proceeded to engage him in agreeable
conversation. What time had he taken the photographs? About six
o’clock. Rather dark? Not particularly, but of course he had had to
make a time exposure. How long? Thirty seconds. How many exposures did
he make? Four. How many plates had he brought with him? A dozen. Did
he use the other plates for anything?
Mr. Pennypacker nodded.
“I photographed the interior of the shanty.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Tutt eagerly.
No photograph could harm him. Nothing could hurt him now! Why had not
Mason put them in evidence?
“Have you the prints with you?”
Mr. Pennypacker affably leaned over and produced them from a package
beside him, and Mr. Tutt saw a chance for one of those grand-stand
plays so dear to the heart of the trial lawyer.
“I offer them in evidence,” said he with a glance at the jury. “I
don’t know why Squire Mason didn’t put them in, but--whatever his
reasons may have been--_I’ll_ put them in--and we’ll see what we can
find! Now”--as the stenographer finished marking the prints--“you say
you took these pictures within two hours of the murder, do you?”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Pennypacker. “But I had to give them a ten minute
exposure!”
Mr. Tutt picked one of them up and glanced at it. Then he suddenly
turned faint. What an everlasting fool he had been! With the utmost
difficulty he controlled himself.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Pennypacker!” he said with a forced smile.
“Thank you very much! They are most excellent and artistic
photographs! That is all!”
Mr. Tutt sank back and gazed dreamily out of the court room window
through which he could see the weather-cock on the Baptist steeple.
Just as he looked at it some draught of air caused it to veer
suddenly. He had a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those
photographs held no interest for him--far from it! Curse them and the
man who had taken them!
For the photographs--although taken at the hour of six--all showed the
hands of the clock as still pointing to four! Either it had been out
of order or had run down before the homicide and hence as evidence of
the hour of the murder was no value whatsoever. Mr. Tutt by putting
the photographs in evidence had destroyed the alibi that his original
question had so unexpectedly established!
One hope only remained. The jury had not yet seen the photographs. Was
it humanly possible that Squire Mason had not noticed the hands of the
clock at all?
Just then Judge Tompkins said pleasantly:
“I think, gentlemen, that this is a good time to adjourn court until
to-morrow morning.”
III
“So like an arrow swift he flew
Shot by an archer strong,
So did he fly--which brings me to
The middle of my song!”
--John Gilpin.
Somewhere there is a story of terror--done after the manner of Edgar
Allan Poe--in which the hero during a deadly plague from which none
who are stricken ever survive discovers to his horror that in the
night the fatal mark has appeared under his arm, and that he is among
the doomed. His terror and despair are shared by the reader, as well
as his ecstatic relief and joy when he awakes to find that he has been
dreaming. Then for the mere idle satisfaction of disabusing himself of
what are no longer his fears he looks beneath his arm only to find
that the deadly mark is in fact there! The agony of this discovery is
doubly intensified by reason of its following immediately upon a state
of rapturous exaltation.
Highly similar to those of the Spanish victim in the tale in question
were those of Mr. Tutt in discovering that just as, by violating the
canons of experience, he had asked a question by virtue of which he
had created an unforeseen but conclusive alibi for his client, he had
now, by asking another, rendered that alibi of no avail. Never in his
experience had he suffered so staggering a blow. Why had he asked that
fatal question? What imp of Hades had whispered to him that there was
something in those photographs which Mason desired to conceal? It had
been all a trick, a clever “springe to catch a woodcock,” a nicely
baited trap into which he had innocently hopped like an unsuspecting
rabbit. In setting it Mason had not taken a single chance, for, if Mr.
Tutt had not seen fit to offer the photograph in evidence when he did,
the prosecutor, having waited until the conclusion of the defendant’s
case and until Mr. Tutt had attempted to establish his alibi by
proving that Skinny was in Pottsville at four o’clock, would have then
handed them to the jury and shown that in effect the clock by which
Emerson had fixed the hour of the shooting as likewise four was in
effect not a clock at all--and knocked that alibi higher than the
Baptist weathercock. What a fool! What a confounded, inexcusable ass,
idiot and nincompoop he had been! Poor old Mr. Tutt’s theories were
all annihilated at once. This wretched murder case was putting every
principle of tactics upon the everlasting blink. You ought to
cross-examine; you ought not to cross-examine; you ought not to leave
well enough alone; you ought to leave well enough alone. The only
guide left in the legal firmament was that fixed but not particularly
useful pole star of “You never can tell!”
Judge Tompkins arose, bowed and left the bench. Sheriff Higgins let
down the bar of the jury box and the twelve good and true men gathered
up their newspapers and hats and filed after him like a straggling
flock of sheep, down the steps and across Main Street to the Phoenix
House, their temporary place of sojourn while the guests of the People
of the State of New York. Many were the envious glances cast upon
their disappearing backs as the less fortunate agriculturalists
prepared to return to their distant farm houses. Gol ding it! Those
cusses not only had reserved seats for the whole blame show but were
gettin’ paid three dollars a day into the bargain! Gosh darn it all!
Some fellers did hev the luck! Hist back thar, Dobbin, and get yer
tail off’n that shaft!
Then the sheriff returned for Skinny and led him away to the
calaboose, and the crowd which had lingered to observe and comment
upon the defendant’s appearance and demeanor slowly dispersed, leaving
Mr. Tutt alone in the otherwise empty courtroom. Old enough before, he
had aged considerably during the last three minutes of the trial. Mr.
Tutt was suffering from fear--abject fear--of what now seemed the
inevitable fate of his client. In the face of the evidence against him
his mere denial that he had not killed the hermit would go for
nothing. His salvation seemed impossible save through the
rehabilitation of his alibi and, as only one person had heard the
shot, it was only through that person that the time of the homicide
could be established. It now appeared that that same witness who had
testified to Mr. Tutt’s indescribable joy that the hour was four
o’clock, had been looking at the motionless face of a piece of dead
mechanism that might not have been moving for months! Bitterly he
reproached himself that he had not combed Emerson’s recollection until
no item remained undisclosed, for it was possible--just
conceivable--that the witness might have had some other data upon
which to predicate the hour of the crime. If so, it must of necessity
be corroborative of the clock, since Emerson had expressed himself
positively as to the hour. Thus, as Mr. Tutt now perceived--but which
had escaped him at the moment in his excitement over establishing his
alibi--he would have had nothing to lose by pursuing his interrogation
of the witness indefinitely, since he was safe as to the element of
time, and there was nothing else in his testimony which under
cross-examination could be made any more damaging to the defendant
than it already was. Was it too late to recall Emerson to the stand in
the desperate hope that in some other way he might still substantiate
the hour as four o’clock? Perhaps he had looked at his watch. Perhaps
there had been another clock in the shanty. “You never could tell!” At
any rate he must be found and the court’s permission obtained to
recall him to the stand and re-examine him. But it was at best a long,
long chance--a hundred--a thousand!--to-one shot.