The prosecution had other trumps yet to play. It called a name, which
brought into the courtroom, with shambling and uncertain step, a man
whose face was pasty with prison pallour. His thin body was garbed in
the zebra-stripes of the penitentiary's livery, and the hand that he
raised to take oath trembled. His voice, too, carried a quaver of
weakness in its first syllable.
Here at length was the promised sensation. The stenographer who had
accepted his life-term had become star witness for the State. Now,
enlisted from the ranks of the accused, he had undertaken to tell what
purported to be the inside story of the plot.
To hear his words, one had to bend attentively, yet, when he had talked
for an hour, the scratching of pencils at the press table sounded,
through his pauses, almost clamorous, and there was no other sound.
Boone sat, tight of muscle, with his eyes steadfastly fixed on Asa. He
thought that just now he was needed, but at the pit of his stomach
gnawed a sickness of dread, and it seemed to him that already he could
see the gallows rising from its ugly platform.
The bearded lawyer who had once battered down this man's own defence now
stood before him, shepherding his words on toward their climax. Faint
response followed sharp interrogation with a deadly effectiveness.
"When did you first meet the defendant--Asa Gregory?"
"On the thirtieth of January--in the forenoon."
"Where?"
"At my office in the state house."
"Did your office adjoin that of the Secretary of State?"
"It did."
"What occurred at that time and place?"
"Mr. Gregory rapped.... I let him in.... He handed me a letter from the
Governor, and we went into the Secretary's room.... Then he went over to
the window and looked out--and drew the blind part of the way down. For
a while he just studied the room ... taking in its details."
The man in convict garb paused and fell into a fit of broken coughing.
"Did you have any conversation with him?"
"I did, sir."
"What was it, in substance?"
"I explained to him that the plan was to kill Senator Goebel, when he
came to the senate that morning. I showed him two rifles in the
corner.... They were of different makes."
"What did he do then?"
"He had me explain the way to get to the basement. He kneeled down by
the window and sighted one of the guns.... He piled up several law books
to rest it on ... and then he said that he was ready...."
McCalloway's teeth were tight-clamped as he listened.
"Yes, go on."
"He said he had come to get a pardon for 'blowing down old man
Carr'--and was ready to give back favour for favour. Presently I saw
Senator Goebel turning in at the gate, and I said, 'That's him,' and he
said, 'I see him,' and I turned and slipped out of the room. As I was on
the stairs, I heard a rifle shot--and then several pistol shots."
Boone Wellver groaned, and the current of his arteries seemed to run in
icy trickles through his body, but he kept his eyes steadfastly fixed on
Asa, whose life, he felt sure, this man was swearing away in perjury.
Asa gazed back. He even inclined his head with just the ghost of a nod,
and the boy knew that he meant that for encouragement.
Through hours of that day the ghastly story unwound itself, and its
tremendous impact, gaining rather than losing impressiveness from the
faltering style of its telling, left the defence staggered and numbed.
McCalloway, glancing down at the boy's drawn face, felt his own heart
sicken.
But when at last the man with the gray face and the gray, striped livery
had gone, the Commonwealth's attorney rose and said in the full-throated
voice of master of the show, "Now, we will call Saul Fulton."
Saul, who had been indicted but never tried! Saul, too, had taken the
enemy's pay! Neither McCalloway nor Boone doubted that all this drama of
alleged revelation was fathered in falsity out of the reward fund and
its workings, yet one realized out of mature experience, and the other
out of instinct, that to the jury it must all seem irrefutable
demonstration.
In marked contrast with the sorry drabness of that last witness was the
swagger of the next, who came twirling his moustache with the gusto of
pure bravado.
Saul went back of the other's story and ramified its details. He told of
the mountain army which he had helped to recruit, and swore that that
force had come with a full understanding of its mission.
"We went to ther legislature every day, expectin' trouble," he declared,
with a full-voiced boastfulness. "And we were ready to weed out the
Democratic leaders when it started."
"To what purpose was all that planned?" purred the examining lawyer, and
the response capped it with prompt assurance:
"The object was to have a Republican majority before we got through
shooting."
"And you were willing to do your part?"
Virtuously boomed the reply: "If it was in fair battle, I was willin',
yes, sir."
Saul particularized. He recounted that he had himself nominated Asa as a
dependable gun-fighter, and that on the day of the tragedy he had met
Asa on the streets of Frankfort. Asa, he asserted, had brazenly
displayed a pocketful of cartridges.
"He said to me," proceeded the witness; "'Them ca'tridges comes out of a
lot thet's done made hist'ry. Whenever I looks over ther sights of a
rifle-gun, I gits me either money or meat, an' this time I've done got
me both.'"
Boone Wellver had been leaning tensely forward in his seat as he
listened. Here at last, to his own knowledge, the words that were
cementing his kinsman's doom were utterly and viciously false. He had
been a witness to that meeting, and it had been Saul and not Asa who had
seen danger in the possession of cartridges. It had been Saul, too, who
had excitedly instructed him to destroy the evidence.
But Saul continued glibly: "Asa had done named ter me, back thar in ther
mountains, thet he reckoned him an' ther Governor could swap favours. So
when we met up that day in Frankfort, he said, 'Me an' ther Big Man, we
got tergether an' done a leetle business.'"
The courtroom was tensely, electrically silent, when a boy rose out of
his chair, and with the suddenness of a bursting shell shrilled out in
defiance:
"Thet's a damn lie, Saul, an' ye knows hit! I was right thar an--!" The
instant clatter of the Judge's gavel and the staccato outbreak of the
Judge's voice interrupted the interruption. "Silence! Mr. Sheriff, bring
that disturber before the Court."
Still trembling with white-hot indignation, Boone was led forward with
the sheriff's hand on his shoulder, until he stood under the stern
questioning of eyes looking down from the bench.
But instantly, too, Colonel Wallifarro's smoothly controlled voice was
addressing the Court: "May it please your Honour, before you punish this
boy I should like to offer a word or two of explanation."
So Boone did not go to jail, but, after a sharp reprimand, he was sworn
as a witness for the defence, and excluded from the courtroom.
When he took the witness-stand later, it was with a recovered
composure--and his straightforward story went far toward shaking the
impression Saul had left behind him--yet not far enough.
He realized, with black chagrin, that as long as he had sat there
steadfastly calm, he had been to Asa a tower of strength--but that when
he had broken out he had forfeited that privilege--and left his kinsman
unsuccoured.
At last the Commonwealth closed, and Asa himself came to the stand. Had
he been possessed of a lawyer's experience he could hardly have evaded
more skilfully the snares set in his path, as with imperturbable
gallantry he met his skilled hecklers. The even calmness of his velvety
eyes became a matter of newspaper report, and when he had finished his
direct testimony and had been turned over to the enemy, the fashion in
which he cared for himself also found its way into the news columns.
Asa kept before him the realization that he had been advertised as a
"bad man" and an assassin. Just now he was intent upon impressing the
jury with his urbane proof against exasperation, even when the invective
of insinuation mounted to ferocity,
"You have known the witness, Saul Fulton, for years, have you not?"
demanded the cross-examiner.
"I've known him all my life."
"Can you state any motive he should have for offering malicious and
false evidence against you?"
"Any reason for his lyin'?"
The prisoner gazed at the barking attorney with a calm seriousness and
replied suavely:
"No, sir, only that he's swearin' to save his own neck from the
rope--an' thet's a right pithy reason, I reckon."
Yet all the while that he was making his steep, uphill fight, Asa was
feeling a secret disquiet growing to an obsession within him. He could
not forget that some one upon whose reassurance he had leaned had been
banished from that place where his enemies were bent upon his undoing.
He felt as if the red lantern had been quenched on a dangerous
crossing--and the psychology of the thing gnawed at his overtried
nerves.
Boone's freckled face and wide blue eyes had seemed to stand for
serenity, where all else was hectic and fevered.
To Asa, that intangible yet tranquillizing support had meant what the
spider meant to Bruce, and now it had been taken from him.
The bearded attorney who had destroyed defendant after defendant was
battering at him, with the massed artillery of vindictive and
unremitting aggressiveness.
For a long while Asa fenced warily--coolly, remembering that to slip the
curb upon his temper meant ruin, but as assault followed assault,
through hours, his senses began to reel, his surety began to weaken, and
his eyes began to see red.
The attorney who was scourging him with the whips of law saw the first
break in his armour and bored into it, with ever-increasing
vindictiveness.
Into Asa's mind flashed a picture of the cabin back home, of the wife
suffering an agony of anxiety; of the baby whom he might never again
see. He seemed groping with his gaze for the steadying eyes of the boy,
who was no longer there--whom he desperately needed.
"Asa's gittin' right mad," whispered one mountaineer to another. "I'd
hate ter encounter him, right now, in a highway--an' be an enemy of
his'n."
But the bearded attorney, who was not in the highway, only badgered and
heckled him with a more calculating precision and, as he slowly shook
the witness out of self-restraint into madness, he was himself
deliberately circling from his place at the Commonwealth's table to a
position directly back of the jury box.
Now, having achieved that vantage point, he watched the prisoner's face
grow sombre and furious as the prisoner's head lowered like that of a
charging bull.
One more question he put--a question of deliberate insult, which brought
an admonitory rap of the Judge's gavel; then he thrust out an accusing
finger which pointed straight into the defendant's face.
"Look at him now, gentlemen of the jury," he dramatically thundered.
"Look at those mismated eyes and determine whether or not this is the
man who blocked the state-house doorway--the assassin who laid low a
governor!"
Gazing from their seats in the jury-box, the men of the venire saw
before them and facing them a prisoner whose two fine, calm eyes had
been transfigured and mismated by passion--whose pupils were marked by
some puzzling phenomenon of rabid anger that seemed to leave them no
longer twins.
It was much later that the panel came in from the room where it had
wrangled all night, but that had been the decisive moment. Three or four
reporters detached themselves from their places at the press table and
stood close to the windows.
Then the foreman spoke, for in Kentucky the jury not only decides guilt
but fixes the penalty, and the reporters raised one finger each--It
meant that the verdict was death.