Part 26 (2/2)

Sympathy seemed to be lacking in the crowd. Everybody was against Joe, that was attested by the glum faces and silence which met her on every hand. She was amazed at their stupidity. There they stood, people who had seen Joe grow up, people who knew that a Newbolt would give his last cent and go hungry to meet an obligation; that he would wear rags to pay his debts, as Peter had done, as Joe was doing after him; that he would work and strive night and day to keep fair his honorable name, and to preserve the honest record of the family clear and clean.

They all knew that, and they knew that a Newbolt never lied, but they hunched their backs and turned away their heads as if they thought a body was going to hit them when she spoke. It disgusted her; she felt like she could turn loose on some of them with their own records, which she had from a generation back.

She approached the buggy as Joe took up the lines and prepared to drive out of the gate.

”I don't see why they think you done it, son, it's so unreasonable and unneighborly of them,” said she.

”Neighborly!” said Joe, with sudden bitterness in his young voice. ”What am I to them but 'the pore folks' boy'? They didn't believe me, Mother, but when I get a chance to stand up before Judge Maxwell over at Shelbyville, I'll be talking to a gentleman. A gentleman will understand.”

That sounded like his father, she thought. It moved her with a feeling of the pride which she had reflected feebly for so many years.

”I hope so, son,” said she. ”If you're not back in a day or two, I'll be over to Shelbyville.”

”Drive on, drive on!” ordered Bill, the old black revolver in his hand.

The crowd was impressed by that weapon, knowing its history, as everybody did. Greening's more or less honorable father had carried it with him when he rode in the train of Quantrell, the infamous bushwhacker. It was the old man's boast to his dying day that he had exterminated a family of father and five sons in the raid upon Lawrence with that old weapon, without recharging it.

Joe drove through the open gate without a look behind him. His face was pale, his heart was sick with the humiliation of that day. But he felt that it was only a temporary cloud into which he had stepped, and that clearing would come again in a little while. It was inconceivable to him how anybody could be so foolish as to believe, or even suspect, that he had murdered Isom Chase.

The a.s.sembled people having heard all there was to hear, and seen all there was to see at the gate, began to straggle back to the farmhouse to gossip, to gape, and exclaim. To Greening and his family had fallen the office of comforting the widow and arranging for the burial, and now Sol had many offers to sit up with the corpse that night.

Mrs. Newbolt stood at the roadside, looking after the conveyance which was taking her son away to jail, until a bend behind a tall hedge hid it from her eyes. She made no further attempt to find sympathy or support among her neighbors, who looked at her curiously as she stood there, and turned away selfishly when she faced them.

Back over the road that she had hurried along that morning she trudged, slowly and without spirit, her feet like stones. As she went, she tried to arrange the day's happenings in her mind. All was confusion there.

The one plain thing, the thing that persisted and obtruded, was that they had arrested Joe on a charge that was at once hideous and unjust.

Evening was falling when she reached the turn of the road and looked ahead to her home. She had no heart for supper, no heart to lift the latch of the kitchen door and enter there. There was no desire in her heart but for her son, and no comfort in the prospect of her oncoming night.

CHAPTER IX

THE SEALED ENVELOPE

In the light of Joe's reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been found in the burst bag on Isom's breast; and Joe's declaration that he had not seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of that community believed the verdict of the coroner's jury to be just.

This refusal of Joe's to talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter's death. But it looked more like bull-headedness to them.

”Don't the darned fool know he's pokin' his head under the gallus?” they asked.

What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin' there in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that there money come from, gentlemen? That's what I want you to tell _me_!

Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to group, and which n.o.body could answer, as they stood discussing it after Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving them the weight of his experience.

”That Newbolt's deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen,” he said, shaking his serious whiskers. ”There's a lot more behind this case than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was planned away ahead. It's been a long time since I've seen anybody on the witness-stand as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt boy. He knew just what to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we'll fetch it out of him--or somebody else.”

As men went home to take up their neglected tasks, they talked it all over. They wondered what Joe would have done with that money if he had succeeded in getting away with it; whether he would have made it out of the country, or whether the invincible Bill Frost, keen on his scent as a fox-hound, would have pursued him and brought him back.

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