Kitabı oku: «The Tempering», sayfa 8

CHAPTER XIII

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.

CHAPTER XIV

As Victor McCalloway and Boone went to the railroad station on the afternoon of the day that brought the trial to its end, they found the platform crowded with others who, like themselves, were turning away from a finished chapter.

The boy stared ahead now with a glassy misery, and the eyes and ears, usually so keenly awake to new sights and sounds, seemed too stunned for service.

Had it been the boy himself, instead of his kinsman, who stood condemned to die, he could hardly have suffered more. Indeed, had it been his own tragedy, Boone would not have allowed himself this surrender of bearing under the common gaze, but would have held his chin more defiantly high.

Back in the hills for the first time he was listless over his studies, and even when he stood, sword in hand, before McCalloway, the spirit of swift enthusiasm seemed departed from him. He had moved away from the cabin where the "granny folks" dwelt to help Araminta Gregory run the farm which had been bereft of its man, and his eyes followed her grief-stricken movements with a wordless sympathy.

McCalloway realized that now, even more than formerly, the flame of the convicted man's influence was operating on the raw materials of this impressionable mind, welding to vindictiveness the feudal elements of its metal. But McCalloway had learned patience in a hard school, and now he was applying the results of his experience. Slowly under his sagacious guidance the stamp of hatred which had latterly marred the face of his youthful protégé began to lighten. Boone was as yet too young to go under the yoke of unbroken pessimism. The very buoyancy of his years and splendid health argued that somehow the clouds must break. Meanwhile his task was clean cut – and dual. Asa's "woman" must have, from the stony farm, every stalk and ear of corn that could be wrung from its stinted productivity – and he must put behind him that ignorance which had so long victimized his kind. So once more he turned to his books when he was not busy with hoe or plough.

One day, while the boy and the man sat together in McCalloway's house, knuckles rapped sharply on the door. It is contrary to the custom of frontier caution for one to come so far as the threshold without first raising his voice in announcement from a greater distance.

But the door opened upon a grizzled man at the sight of whose face McCalloway bent forward as though confronted by a spectre – and indeed the newcomer belonged to a world which he had renounced as finally as though it had been of another incarnation.

This visitor was lean and weather-beaten. His face was long and somewhat dour, but tanned brown, and instead of speaking he brought his hand to his temple with a smart salute. It was such a salute as bespoke a long life of soldiering and the second nature of military habit. The voice in which McCalloway greeted him was almost unrecognizable as his own, because it was both far away and strained.

"Sergeant!" he exclaimed; "what has brought you here?"

"The lad, sor'r," the other gravely reminded him. "I must speak with ye alone. 'Tis a verra private and a verra serious matter that brings me."

Boone had never heard so hard a note in his benefactor's voice as that which crept into his curt reply:

"It must needs be – to warrant your coming without permission, MacTavish."

They were just finishing their daylight supper, and the boy rose, pushing back his chair. Faithfully he regarded his pledge of respecting the other's privacy whenever he was not invited to share it, and instinctively he felt that this was no moment for his intrusion.

"I reckon I'll hev ter be farin' over thar ter see how Asa's woman's comin' on," he remarked casually, as he reached for the hat that lay at his feet. "Like es not she needs a gittin' of firewood erginst nightfall."

But the matter-of-fact tone and manner were on the surface. Boone secretly distrusted the few messages that came to his preceptor from the outside world. By such voices he might be called back again and hearken to the summons. Boone could not contemplate existence with both his idols ravished from his temple.

Now he closed the door behind him in so preoccupied a mood that he left his rifle standing against the wall forgotten and McCalloway remained standing by the table rather inflexible of posture and sternly inquisitorial of countenance.

"MacTavish," he said in sharply clipped syllables, "you are one of few – a very few – who know of my incognito and address. I have relied upon you implicitly to guard those secrets. I trust you can explain following me into what you must know was a retirement not to be trespassed upon without incurring my anger – my very serious anger."

Respectfully, but with a face full of eager resoluteness, the other saluted again.

"General," he said, "it's China – they need you there."

"Sergeant" – an angry light leaped in the steel-gray eyes – "if they want me in China some one whom I have trusted has betrayed my identity. No living soul there ever heard of Victor McCalloway, Mister McCalloway, not General Anything, mind you!"

The newcomer crossed to the centre of the room, and his movements were quick and precise, as are those of the drill-ground.

"To every other man on earth ye may be Mister McCalloway – but to me ye are my general. Before I'd betray any trust ye might place in me, sor'r, I'd cut off that hand at the wrist, as ye ken, sor'r, full well. I've told nae soul where ye wor'r. I've only said that I'd seek for ye."

"But in God's name how – ?"

"If I may interrupt ye, sor'r, I am no longer Sergeant Major MacTavish; I'm a time-retired man at home, but when I wear a uniform now it's that of the army of the Manchu Emperor. They seek to reorganize their army along western lines. They want genius. They ken nothin' of ye save that one Victor McCalloway was once a British officer of high rank who served so close to Dinwiddie, that Dinwiddie's strategy is known to him. – Read this, sor'r, and ye'll understand more of the matter."

The General took the large, official-looking missive and stood for a moment with a drawn and concentrated brow before he slit its linen-lined covering.

The feel of the thing in his fingers brought to him a certain stirring and quickening of the pulses: such a restiveness as may come to the retired thoroughbred at the far-off sound of the paddock bugle, or to the spent war horse at the rolling of drums.

The heavy blue paper and the thick seal set into disquieting momentum an avalanche of memories. Active days which he had resolved to forget were conjured into rebirth as he handled this bulky envelope which proclaimed its officialdom. Even the daily papers came to him here with desultory lack of sequence. He knew in disjointed fashion how that same summer an anti-foreign revolt had broken out in Shantung and spread to Pechili. He had read that the Japanese Government had dispatched twenty thousand men to China. Later he had followed the all too meagre accounts of how the Allies had raced for Peking to relieve the besieged legations. The young Emperor's ambition to impress upon his realm the stamp of western civilization had made him, for two years, a virtual prisoner to the Empress Dowager and her reactionaries. Now in turn the Empress Dowager was in flight and, presumably, the Japanese, working in concert with agents of the captive Emperor and Prince Ching, were looking toward the future. – It would seem that they divined once more the opportunity to Occidentalize army and government. If so, it was the rising of a world tide which might well run to flood, and it offered him a man's work. At all events, this letter which caused his fingers to itch and tremble as they held it, came from high Japanese sources and it was addressed only "Excellency," without a name. The envelope itself was directed to "The Honourable Victor McCalloway."

For a long time he stood there immovable, looking at the paper, as great dreams marched before him. Organization, upbuilding – that was his metier!

Seeing the rapt concentration of his brow and the hunger of his eyes, the former British sergeant spoke again with persuasive fervour:

"Go under any name ye like, sor'r; ye'll be prompt to give it glory! For many years I served under ye, General. For God's sake, let me take my commands from ye once again! Come out to China, sor'r, where they need a great soldier – and can keep silent!"

The hermit strode over and laid a hand on the shoulder of his visitor. Their eyes met and held. "Old comrade," said McCalloway, as the rust of huskiness creaked in his voice, "I know you for the truest steel that ever God put into the blade of a man's soul – but I must have time to think."

He crossed the room slowly and took up Dinwiddie's sword. Tenderly he drew the blade from the scabbard, and as he looked at it his eyes first glowed with fires of longing, then grew misty with the sadness of remembrance.

After that he laid the scabbard down and handled once more the sheets that had been in the envelope. He did not re-read the written sentences, but let his fingers move slowly along the smooth surface of the paper, while his pupils held as far-away a look as though they were seeing the land from which the communication had come.

But, after a little, McCalloway came out of that half-hypnotized absorption, and his eyes wandered about the room until finally they fell on the rifle that the mountain boy had forgotten to take away with him.

He knew Boone well enough to feel sure that he had not gone far without remembering. He was certain, too, that his young protégé would have returned for it before now had he not been inhibited by his deference for the elder's privacy.

Over there across the world was an army to be shaped, disciplined – but an army of alien blood, of yellow skins. Here was the less conspicuous task to which he had set his hand; the shaping of a single life, beset with hereditary dangers, into a worthy edifice of which the timbers and masonry were Anglo-Saxon and the pattern Americanism. He had too far committed himself to that architecture to turn back.

Slowly he shook his head. The struggle had been sharp, but the decision was final.

"No, MacTavish, old comrade and old friend," he said very seriously; "no; I've withdrawn from all that. I'll not deny that my hand sometimes aches for a grip on a sabre-hilt, and my ears are hungry for a bugle – but that's all past. Go out and make an army there, if you can, but I stay here. I needs must stay."