During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in
Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been
denied bail, the boy back in the laurel-mantled hills smouldered with
passionate resentment for what he believed to be a monstrous injustice.
In his quest of education he sought refuge from the bitter brooding that
had begun to mar his young features with its stamp of sullenness. Asa
had killed men before, but it had been in that feud warfare which was
sanctioned by his own conscience. Now he stood charged with a murder
done for hire, the mercenary taking off of a man for whom he had no
enmity save that of the abstract and political. Upon his kinsman's
innocence the boy would have staked his life, and yet he must look
helplessly on and see him thrown to the lions of public indignation.
Of Saul, he hardly thought at all. Saul was small-fry. The Commonwealth
would treat him as such, but upon Asa it would wreak a surcharged anger,
because to send Asa Gregory to the gallows would be to establish a
direct link between the Governor who had pardoned him and mountain
murder-lust.
Already the Secretary of State had been disposed of with a promptitude
which, his friends asserted, savoured rather of the wolf pack than the
courtroom. The verdict had been guilty, and his case was now pending on
a motion for rehearing.
Already, too, a stenographer, who had been in the employ of the fugitive
Governor, had been given a life sentence and had preferred accepting it
without appeal to risking the graver alternative of the gallows.
As he lay in jail waiting until the slow grind of the law-mill should
bring him into its hopper, Asa too recognized the extreme tenuousness of
his chances.
But it was not until the wheat had been harvested and threshed in the
rich bluegrass fields that the session of court was called to order,
whose docket held for Asa Gregory the question of life and death.
That trial was to be at Georgetown, a graciously lying town about whose
borders stretched estates, where a few acres were worth as much as a
whole farm in the ragged and meagre hills. It was a town of kindly
people, but just now of very indignant people, blinded by an unbalanced
anger. It was not a hopeful place for a mountaineer with a notched gun
who stood taxed with the murder from ambush of a governor.
Over the door of the brick court house stood an image of the blindfolded
goddess. She was a weather-worn deity, corroded out of all resemblance
to the spirit of eternal youthfulness which she should have exemplified,
and Boone pressed his lips tight, as he entered with McCalloway, and
noted that the scales which she held aloft were broken, but that the
sword in the other hand was intact--and unsheathed.
At the stair head, in precaution against the electrically charged
tension of the air, deputies passed outspread hands over the pockets and
hips of each man who entered, in search for concealed weapons. About the
semicircular table, fronting the bench and the prisoner's dock, sat the
men of the press, sharpening their pencils and--waiting.
Under the faded portrait of Chief Justice Marshall a battery of windows
let in the summer sun and the mellow voice of a distant negro, raised
somewhere in a camp-meeting song.
Across a narrow alleyway were other windows in another building, and
beyond them operators sat idling by newly installed telegraph keys.
These men had no interest in the routine of the "running story." That
was a matter to be handled by the regular telegraph offices. These
newly strung wires would be dedicated to a single "flash"--when the
climax came. Then the reporters would no longer be sitting at their
crescent-shaped table. A few of them would stand framed in those
courtroom windows under the portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, and as
the words fell from the lips that held doom, their hands would rise,
with one, two, three, or four fingers extended, as the case might
warrant. In response to that prearranged signal, the special operators
would open their keys and--if one finger had been shown--over their
lines would run the single but sufficient word "death." Two fingers
would mean "life imprisonment"; three, "acquittal"; four would indicate
a "hung-jury." That time was still presumably far off, but the
arrangement for it was complete.
In a matter of seconds after that grim pantomime occurred, foremen of
printing crews standing by triple-decked presses in Louisville, in
Cincinnati--in many other towns as well--would reach down and lift from
the floor one of the several type metal forms prepared in advance to
cover each possible exigency. A switch would be flipped. Back to the hot
slag of the melting pots would go the other half-cylinders, and within
three minutes papers, damp with ink and news, would be pouring from the
maws of the presses into the hands of waiting boys.
To Boone these preparations were not yet comprehensible, but as
McCalloway led him to a seat far forward he felt the tense atmosphere of
place and moment.
He recognized, in those lines of opposing counsel, an array of
notability. He picked out, with a glare of hatred, the bearded man whom
the prosecution had brought as co-counsel, from another State, because
of his great repute as a breaker-down of witnesses under
cross-examination. Then his eyes lighted, as down the aisle came the
full figure of Colonel Tom Wallifarro--to take its place among the
attorneys for the defence. There was reassurance in his calmness and
unexcited dignity.
And after interminable preliminaries, he heard the voice of the clerk
droning from his docket, "The Commonwealth of Kentucky, against Asa
Gregory; wilful murder," and after yet other delays the velvety
direction from the bench, "Mr. Sheriff, bring the prisoner into court."
Asa's face, as he was led through the side door, was less bronzed than
formerly, but his carriage was no less erect or confident. In a new suit
of dark colour, with fresh linen instead of his hickory shirt, clean
shaven and immaculately combed, the defendant was a transformed person,
and if there remained any semblance of the highland desperado, it was to
be found only in the catlike softness of his tread and the falcon
alertness of his fine eyes. Pencils at the press table began their light
scratching chorus--the reporters were writing their description of the
accused.
Asa Gregory's line of defence had been foreshadowed in the examining
court. He had sworn that he arrived on the day of the shooting to
petition a pardon, and he had known nothing of what was in the air
until, from street talk, he learned of the tragedy.
The chief issue of fact pivoted on his testimony that on that day he had
not been near the state house or executive building. The Commonwealth
would contradict that claim with the counter assertion that, straight as
a hiving bee, Asa had hastened from the train to the Governor's official
headquarters, where he had been cold-bloodedly rehearsed in his grim
duties. After firing the shot, the prosecution would contend he had
taken command of the other mountaineers who refused to the police the
privilege of entry and search.
Through days, weeks even, after that, Boone sat, always in the same
place, with steadfast confidence in the eyes which he bent upon his
kinsman.
Into the press dispatches began to steal mention of a boy in a cheap but
new suit of store clothes, whose eyes held those of the prisoner with a
rapt and unwavering constancy. It was even said that the amazingly
steady courage of the defendant seemed at times of unusual stress to
lean on that supporting confidence, and that whenever they brought him
from jail to courtroom, he looked first of all for the boy, as a pilot
might look for a reef-light.
Shortly before the Commonwealth was ready to close, rumours went abroad.
It was hinted that new and sensational witnesses would take the stand,
with revelations as spectacular as the climax of a melodrama.
Boone had followed the evidence with a tense absorption. He had marked
the effect of each point; the success or failure of every blow, and he
realized what a powerful web was being woven about the man in whom he
fully believed. There was no escaping the cumulative and strengthening
effect of circumstance built upon circumstance.
He recognized, too, how like a keystone in an arch was the dependence of
the State upon proving one thing: that Asa had been present, just after
the shooting, and in command of those who barred the doors of the
executive building against legitimate search. He took comfort in the
fact that so far it had not been established by one sure piece of
evidence. Then came the last of the Commonwealth's announced witnesses.
Upon the faces of the attorneys for the prisoner quivered a dubious
expression of apprehension--as they waited the promised assault of the
masked batteries. The son of the man who had walked at Senator Goebel's
side, when he fell, took the stand and told with straightforward
directness the story of the five minutes after the shot had sounded. He
and a policeman had sought entrance to the building, which presumably
harboured the assassin--and mountain men had halted him at the door,
under the leadership of one to whom the rest deferred. He described that
commander with fulness of detail, and it was as if he were painting in
words a portrait of the man in the prisoner's dock.
"I was there as a volunteer--to see that no one who might be guilty
escaped from the building," testified the witness with convincing
candour. "I noticed one man in particular--because he seemed to be the
unofficial leader of the rest. Some one called him Asa."
The man's voice was responsibly, almost hesitantly, grave, and on the
faces in the jury box one could read the telling impression of his
words.
Then the bearded attorney, whose fame was secure as a heckler of
witnesses, rose dramatically from his chair.
"Do you see that man in the courtroom now?"
For a matter of seconds testifier and prisoner gazed with level
directness into each other's eyes, while over the crowded courtroom hung
a tense pall of stillness.
Then the witness spoke in a tone of bewilderment--his words coming
slowly--as though they surprised himself.
"No. I don't think I see him here."
The poised figure of the lawyer, drawn statuesquely upright, winced as
painfully as though a trusted hand had smitten him, and in his abrupt
change of expression was betrayal of dismay and chagrin.
"You say--you can't--identify him!" he echoed incredulously.
Stubbornly the man who was testifying shook his head.
"May I explain in my own way?" he inquired, and as the lawyer barked
raspingly back at him, the Court intervened:
"This is your own witness--You must understand the impropriety of
attempting to force him."
"While I was looking at the defendant there, just now," went on the man
in the chair, "I was seeing only his side face, and I was positive that
he was the person I was describing. Feature for feature and line for
line ... the likeness seemed exact. I was willing to swear to it.... But
when he turned and faced me ... I saw something else ... and now I don't
think he _is_ the man."
The words came in a puzzled and dumfounded confession, and the witness
paused, then went resolutely on again: "This man has a fine pair of
clear and well-matched eyes, when one sees them both at once.... That
one at the door had something ... I can't say just what it was ... that
marred one eye. I shouldn't call it a cast exactly ... but they didn't
match."
Abruptly the State dismissed that witness, and about the defence tables
went quiet but triumphant smiles--which the jury did not miss, as the
pencils of the press writers raced. But over Boone Wellver's face passed
a shadow, and Asa, catching his eye across the heads of the crowd, read
the motion of the boy's moving lips, as, without sound, they shaped the
words, "Keep cool now, Asa! Keep cool."