Part 48 (1/2)

Joe moved his feet uneasily, clasped and unclasped his long fingers where they rested on the arm of his chair, and moistened his lips with his tongue. The struggle was coming now. They would rack him, and tear him, and break his heart.

”I don't know whether they'll believe it or not,” said he at last.

”Where was Ollie Chase when Isom came into that room?” asked the prosecutor, lowering his voice as the men who tiptoed around old Isom when he lay dead on the kitchen floor had lowered theirs.

”You have heard her say that she was in her room upstairs,” said Joe.

”But I am asking you this question,” the prosecutor reminded him sharply. ”Where was Ollie Chase?”

Joe did not meet his questioner's eyes when he answered. His head was bowed slightly, as if in thought.

”She was in her room, I suppose. She'd been in bed a long time, for it was nearly midnight then.”

The prosecuting attorney pursued this line of questioning to a persistent and trying length. He wanted to know all about the relations of Joe and Ollie; where their respective rooms were, how they pa.s.sed to and from them, and the entire scheme of the household economy.

He asked Joe pointedly, and swung back to that question abruptly and with sharp challenge many times, whether he ever made love to Ollie; whether he ever held her hands, kissed her, talked with her when Isom was not by to hear what was said.

The people snuggled down and forgot the oncoming darkness, the gray forerunner of which already had invaded the room as they listened. This was what they wanted to hear; this was, in their opinion, getting down to the thing that the prosecutor should have taken up at the beginning and pushed to the guilty end. They had come there, day after day, and sat patiently waiting for that very thing. But the great sensation which they expected seemed a tedious thing in its development.

Joe calmly denied the prosecutor's imputations, and put them aside with an evenness of temper and dignity which lifted him to a place of high regard in the heart of every woman present, from grandmother to high-school miss. For even though a woman believes her sister guilty, she admires the man who knows when to hold his tongue.

For two hours and more Sam Lucas kept hammering away at the stern front of the defendant witness. He had expected to break him down, simple-minded country lad that he supposed him to be, in a quarter of that time, and draw from him the truth of the matter in every detail. It was becoming evident that Joe was feeling the strain. The tiresome repet.i.tion of the questions, the unvarying denial, the sudden sorties of the prosecutor in attempt to surprise him, and the constant labor of guarding against it--all this was heaping up into a terrific load.

Time and again Joe's eyes had gone to the magnet of Alice Price's face, and always he had seen her looking straight at him--steadily, understandingly, as if she read his purpose. He was satisfied that she knew him to be innocent of that crime, as well as any of the indiscretions with Ollie which the prosecutor had attempted to force him to admit. If he could have been satisfied with that a.s.surance alone, his hour would have been blessed. But he looked for more in every fleeting glance that his eyes could wing to her, and in the turmoil of his mind he was unable to find that which he sought.

Sam Lucas, seeing that the witness was nearing the point of mental and physical strain at which men go to pieces, and the vigil which they have held above their secrets becomes open to surprise, hung to him with his worriment of questions, scarcely granting him time to sigh.

Joe was pestered out of his calm and dignified att.i.tude. He twisted in his chair, where many a confounded and beset soul had writhed before him, and ran his fingers through his long hair, disturbing it into fantastic disorder. His breath came through his open lips, his shoulders sagged wearily, his long back was bent as he drooped forward, whipping his f.a.gged mind to alertness, guarding every word now, weighing every answer a deliberate while. Sweat drenched his face and dampened the thick wisps of hair. He scooped the welling moisture from his forehead with his crooked finger and flung it to the floor with a rustic trick of the fields.

Sam Lucas gave him no respite. Moment by moment he pressed the panting race harder, faster; moment by moment he grew more exacting, imperative and pressing in his demands for unhesitating replies. While he hara.s.sed and urged the sweating victim, the prosecutor's eyes narrowed, his thin lips pressed hard against his teeth. The moment was approaching for the final a.s.sault, for the fierce delivery of the last, invincible dart.

The people felt it coming, and panted with the acute pleasures of expectation; Hammer saw its hovering shadow, and rose to his feet; Mrs.

Newbolt suffered under the strain until she rocked from side to side, unconscious of all and everybody but herself and Joe, and groaned.

What were they going to do to Joe--what were they going to do?

Sam Lucas was hurling his questions into Joe's face, faster and faster.

His voice was shaded now with the inflection of accusation, now discredit; now it rose to the pitch of condemnation, now it sank to a hoa.r.s.e whisper of horror as he dwelt upon the scene in Isom Chase's kitchen, the body of old Isom stretched in its own blood upon the floor.

Joe seemed to stumble over his replies, to grope, to flounder. The agony of his soul was in his face. And then, in a moment of tortured desperation he rose from his seat, tall, gaunt, disordered, and clasped his hand to his forehead as if driven to the utmost bound of his endurance and to the outer brink of his resources.

The prosecutor paused with leveled finger, while Joe, remembering himself, pushed his hair back from his brow like one waking from a hot and troubled sleep, and resumed his seat. Then suddenly, in full volume of voice, the prosecutor flung at him the lance for which he had been weakening Joe's defenses through those long and torturing hours.

”Tell this jury what the 'words' were which you have testified pa.s.sed between you and Isom Chase after he made the threat to kill you, and before he ran for the gun!”

Hammer bellowed forth an objection, which was quietly overruled. It served its purpose in a way, even though it failed in its larger intent, for the prosecutor's headlong a.s.sault was checked by it, the force of his blow broken.

Joe sat up as if cold water had been dashed over him. Instead of crus.h.i.+ng him entirely, and driving him to the last corner shrinking, beaten and spiritless, and no longer capable of resistance, it seemed to give him a new grip on himself, to set his courage and defiance again on the fighting line.

The prosecuting attorney resented Hammer's interference at the moment of his victory--as he believed it--and turned to him with an ugly scowl.