Part 61 (1/2)
Raines, still unsubdued, shouted out, ”You take your gun away from that man, you big stiff!”
”_Silence!_” bellowed Carmody. ”I'll have you removed if you utter another word.”
”I refuse to take orders from a pill-pusher like you.”
”Sheriff, seat that man,” commanded Carmody, white with wrath.
Throop, thrusting Busby back into his chair, advanced upon Raines with ponderous menace. ”Sit down, you old skunk.”
”Don't you touch me!” snarled the lawyer.
”Out you go,” said Throop, with a clutch at the defiant man's throat.
Raines reached under his coat-tails for a weapon, but Rawlins caught him from behind, and Throop, throwing his arms around his shoulders in a bearlike hug, carried him to his chair and forced him into it.
”Now will you be quiet?”
The whole room was silent now, silent as death, with a dozen men on their feet with weapons in their hands, waiting to see if Raines would rise.
Breaking this silence, Carmody, lifted by excitement to unusual eloquence, cried out: ”Gentlemen, I call upon you to witness that I am in no way exceeding my authority. The dignity of this court must be upheld.” He turned to the jury, who were all on end and warlike. ”I call upon you to witness the insult which Mr. Raines has put on this court, and unless he apologizes he will be ejected from the room.”
Raines saw that he had gone too far, and with a wry face and contemptuous tone of voice muttered an apology which was in spirit an insult, but Carmody accepted the letter of it with a warning that he would brook no further displays of temper.
When the coroner resumed his interrogation of Busby, whose sullen calm had given place to a look of alarm and desperation, he refused to speak one word in answer to questions, and at last Carmody, ordering him to take a seat in the room, called Mrs. Eli Kitsong to the chair.
She was a thin, pale little woman with a nervous twitch on one side of her face, and the excitement through which she had just pa.s.sed rendered her almost speechless; but she managed to tell the jury that Busby and Watson had fought and that she had warned her son not to run with Hart Busby.
”I knew he'd get him into trouble,” she said. ”I told Henry not to go with him; but he went away with him in spite of all I could say.”
”Did you actually _see_ the fight between Busby and Watson?”
”No, I only heard Ed tell about it.”
”Did he say Busby threatened to kill him?”
”Yes, he did, but he laughed and said he was not afraid of a fool kid like him.”
Busby was deeply disturbed. He sat staring at the floor, moistening his lips occasionally with the tip of his tongue as the coroner called one after another of his neighbors to testify against him. The feeling that Carmody was on the right track spread through the audience, but Abe insisted that the Kauffmans be called to the stand, and to this Hanscom added:
”I join in that demand. Call Miss McLaren. I want the owners.h.i.+p of these shoes settled once and for all.”
In the tone of one making a concession, Carmody said, ”Very well. Mr.
Sheriff, take Busby out and ask Miss McLaren to step this way.”
As the young ruffian was led out Rita sprang up as if to follow him, but Carmody restrained her. ”Stay where you are. I want you to confront Miss McLaren.”
A stir, a sigh of satisfaction, pa.s.sed over the room, and every eye was turned toward the door through which Helen must approach. Not one of all the town-folk and few of the country-folk had ever seen her face or heard her voice. To them she was a woman of mystery, and for the most part a woman of dark repute, capable of any enormity. They believed that she had been living a hermit life simply and only for the reason that she had been driven out of the East by the authorities, and most of them believed that the man she was living with was her paramour.
Every preconception of her was of this savage sort, and so when the sheriff reappeared, ushering in a tall, composed, and handsome young woman whose bearing, as well as her features, suggested education and refinement, the audience stared in dumb amazement.