Part 36 (1/2)

His spirits lightened somewhat in the process of dressing for his outing. They lightened still more when, on his way to the place of entertainment, he came up with three or four of his mates similarly bound, and went on with them, easily the hero of the little group.

Sutro, though a county seat, was a place of few excitements. The finding of the injured tramp, his death, the inquest, which had been held that day, were topics of surpa.s.sing interest, and Robbins, by virtue of his momentary contact, found his importance measurably enhanced. Before the evening was over, he had told his story a half-dozen times, each time with less repulsion, with a keener sense of its dramatic value.

'I was walking along the cut--you know, there where the train goes under you--and I saw him and yelled at the engineer to stop. I thought he was dead already--he looked like it. I don't know what I yelled for, only I thought he'd roll off. No, I didn't say I saw Whiting up on top,--' He adhered scrupulously to the form of his first telling,--'I saw him on those steps on the side. I'd called to him, too, if I'd seen him in time, but I didn't.'

'I bet he'd have understood,' suggested one of the listeners.

There was something cynical, something appalling, in the fas.h.i.+on in which their untempered youth seized upon the idea of guilt as the concomitant of injury. Robbins, tramping home a half-hour after midnight, felt all round him the concurrence of his mates--a warm supporting wave. He was committed beyond retreat now to his theory.

Almost he was self-deceived. Visualizing the scene, he could scarcely have said whether, actually, he saw Whiting's big body flattened against the side of the car, or whether he himself had superimposed the detail.

He slept late next morning, and emerging, discovered his mother, red-eyed, moving restlessly between kitchen and dining-room. She called to him as he came out, but it was not until he was seated before his oven-dried breakfast that, with a long breath, as though she braced herself,--

'Mrs. Cartwright was here this morning,' she observed.

The words were indifferent, but the tone was so full of significance that instinctively the boy stopped eating to listen.

'She'd been sitting up last night with Mrs. Morgan. Robbins, that boy--that poor boy--wasn't a tramp at all. He was Charlie Morgan, trying to beat his way back home.'

'How'd they know?' Robbins asked.

'Something about the body. There was some mark. It's dreadful for his mother. And it's worse because she thinks--Mrs. Cartwright says a good many people think--it wasn't an accident at all. The wound don't look like it. And then your seeing Mr. Whiting--'

'What'd you tell her that for?' Robbins muttered.

He pushed back his chair, his hunger vanished as if from feasting.

'I didn't. She told me. She says that man who has the truck-garden--Emerson, isn't it?--is saying he saw Mr. Whiting on the car-roof and recognized him. But, of course, a man like that--'

Her tone disposed effectually of the second witness. She got to her feet and began to gather up the dishes from the table.

'Mrs. Cartwright says Mr. Cartwright's looking into the thing. In his position, he'd have to. I told her you'd go up to his office.' She was pa.s.sing behind Robbins's chair as she spoke. To his amazement, she stooped and laid her cheek for an instant against his shoulder. 'Don't you let him worry you, Robbie. You just stick to your story,' she counseled.

'I'm not going near him,' Robbins declared defiantly.

More than the hush of appreciation at his first statement, more than the news of Whiting's anger, his mother's unexpected caress impressed upon him the seriousness of his position.

When he left the house, breakfast ended, he was fixed in his determination neither to get within reach of Cartwright, who was county attorney, nor to repeat his story. But once upon the street he found to his consternation that the story no longer needed his repet.i.tion. It traveled on every tongue, growing as it went. Nor was there lacking other evidence to support it. The examining physician shook his head over the shape and nature of the fatal wound; the helpers who had carried the man were swift to recollect his dying words. From somewhere there sprang the rumor of long-standing feud between Whiting and Charlie Morgan. Then it was no more a rumor but an established fact--time, place, and enhancing circ.u.mstances all known and repeated.

'Enough to hang anybody,' Grotend summed up the evidence, following with his coterie the trend of gossip. 'Only thing is, it's funny the sort of people that do all the hearing and seeing.' He put his arm round Robbins's shoulders. 'There's Nelse here and Doc. Simpson--they're all right; but look at the rest of 'em--If they said it was a nice day, I'd know it was raining. Take that Emerson fellow--'

'Well, if Nelse saw him on the side, I don't see why Emerson couldn't see him up on top; he must 'a' been there,' a listener protested. And Robbins, his throat constricted, drew out of hearing.

For the most part, however, he found a lively satisfaction in the increase of rumor. In such a ma.s.s of testimony, he reasoned, his own bit of spurious evidence was wholly unimportant. When that day and a second and still a third had pa.s.sed with no demand upon him, his oppression vanished. Even the news of Whiting's arrest did not greatly disturb him.

There was now and then a minute of sick discomfort,--once when the truck-gardener attempted to hob-n.o.b with him on the strength of their common information; once and more acutely when an overheard conversation warned him that the accused man was depending on an alibi,--but for the most part he put the danger of discovery resolutely out of his mind.

Even should the alibi be forthcoming and his own story go thereby to the ground, 'They can't be sure about it,' he comforted himself. 'They can't know I didn't--' Even in his thought he left the phrase unfinished.

It was the fourth day after Whiting's arrest that, going toward home in the early evening, he heard his name spoken from behind, and turning, saw the county attorney. His first barely inhibited impulse was toward flight, but it was already too late for that. The elder man's greeting detained him as by a hand upon his arm. He halted reluctantly, and they went on side by side.

The county attorney was a man in his early sixties--a tall stooping figure, gray-haired, with an habitual courtesy of manner which, more than irascibility, intimidated his younger neighbors. It was a part of his courtesy, now, to begin far-off from the subject at hand, in an effort, foredoomed to failure, to put his auditor at ease.

'I often watch you tall boys going past, and remind myself that I am getting old. I can remember most of you in your carriages. Indeed, with you, your father and I were law students together. And now you're in high school, your mother tells me.' And with hardly a s.h.i.+ft of tone, 'She tells me, too,--or rather my wife does,--that you were unfortunate enough to see Mr. Whiting on the day of poor Morgan's death. I am sorry--'