Part 25 (2/2)

”Now you look here, sir, if you'll ask me questions that a gentleman ought to ask, I'll answer you like a gentleman, but I'll never answer such questions as that!”

There was a certain polite deference in Joe's voice, which he felt that he owed, perhaps, to the office that the man represented, but there was a firmness above it all that was unmistakable.

”You refuse to answer any more questions, then?” said the coroner slowly, and with a significance that was almost sinister.

”I'll answer any proper questions you care to ask me,” answered Joe.

”Very well, then. You say that you and Isom quarreled last night?”

”Yes, sir; we had a little spat.”

”A little spat,” repeated the coroner, looking around the room as if to ask the people on whose votes he depended for reelection what _they_ thought of a ”little spat” which ended in a man's death. There was a sort of broad humor about it which appealed to the blunt rural sense. A grin ran over their faces like a spreading wavelet on a pool. ”Well now, what was the beginning of that 'little spat'?”

”Oh, what's that got to do with it?” asked Joe impatiently. ”You asked me that before.”

”And I'm asking you again. What was that quarrel over?”

”None of your business!” said Joe hotly, caring nothing for consequences.

”Then you refuse to answer, and persist in your refusal?”

”Well, we don't seem to get on very well,” said Joe.

”No, we don't,” the coroner agreed snappishly. ”Stand down; that will be all.”

The listening people s.h.i.+fted and relaxed, leaned and whispered, turning quick eyes upon Joe, studying him with furtive wonder, as if they had discovered in him some fearful and hideous thing, which he, moving among them all his life, had kept concealed until that day.

Ollie followed him in the witness-chair. She related her story, framed on the cue that she had taken from Greening's testimony and Joe's substantiation of it, in low, trembling voice, and with eyes downcast.

She knew nothing about the tragedy until Sol called up to her, she said, and then she was in ignorance of what had happened. Mrs. Greening had told her when she came that Isom was killed.

Ollie was asked about the book-agent boarder, as Greening had been asked. Morgan had left on the morning of the fateful day, she said, having finished his work in that part of the country. She and Joe were alone in the house that night.

The coroner spared her, no matter how far his sharp suspicions flashed into the obscurity of the relations between herself and the young bondman. The people, especially the women, approved his leniency with nods. Her testimony concluded the inquiry, and the coroner addressed the jury.

”Gentlemen,” he said, ”you will take into consideration the evidence you have heard, and determine, if possible, the manner in which Isom Chase came to his death, and fix the responsibility for the same. It is within your power to recommend that any person believed by you to be directly or indirectly responsible for his death, be held to the grand jury for further investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body.”

Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life.

Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and with fear.

Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet.

The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other's shoulders and then backed away.

For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day.

The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.

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