Part 36 (2/2)

'I--didn't see him do anything,' Robbins protested. His tongue was suddenly thick and furry, and the words came with difficulty. 'Nothing I could swear to. He was just--there.'

He was staring straight ahead; he could not see how shrewd were the kindly eyes which measured him.

'Timid,' the lawyer was labeling his witness. 'Sensitive.

Over-scrupulous. He'd scruple his testimony out of existence.'

Aloud he spoke with grave rea.s.surance. 'Your merely seeing Mr. Whiting can do him no harm. Indeed, you may not be needed at all. The preliminary examination having been waived--' He paused for a moment before the Nelson gate, his thin-featured old face remote and serious.

'In any case, remember this, my boy. Nothing is ever required of you on the witness stand except to tell your story exactly as you have told it off the stand. In the end the truth will come out and no innocent man be harmed.'

He congratulated himself as he went on up the street that he had rea.s.sured the lad, put before him his irresponsibility in its true light. Had he looked back, he might have seen the rea.s.sured witness staring after him in a kind of horror of amazement. To Robbins it was as if, astoundingly, an outsider had voiced the thought of his own heart.

That truth must prevail, that false witnesses would be brought to confusion--it was a belief ingrained into the fibre of his being. He was sick with a premonition of disgrace.

'Only, they can't _know_,' he tried to hearten himself. 'I can stick to it I did.' He stood still a moment, the line of his sensitive chin grown suddenly hard. 'And I've got to stick to it,' he warned himself. 'I've got to stick it out as long as I live.'

It did not need the county attorney's advice to keep him away from the court-room during the opening days of the trial. With all the youthful masculinity of Sutro crowding the courthouse steps, Robbins sat at home in the hot, darkened parlor, reading from books pulled down at random, seeing always, no matter what he read, a room set thick with eyes--eyes scornful, eyes reproachful, eyes speculative.

When at last the ordeal came, it was so much less dreadful than his antic.i.p.ation of it that he was conscious of an immediate relief. There was, indeed, a minute of blind confusion as he made his way toward the stand--voices singing in his ears, a blue mist before his eyes. Then, somehow, he was sworn and seated, and all round him were the friendly faces of neighbors. He could see the judge nod encouragement to him over his desk; he could see the bracing kindness of the county attorney's glance. Whiting he could not see, the bowed shoulders of a reporter intervening.

He was scarcely nervous after the first moments. His story flowed from him without effort, almost without volition. 'I was walking along the track--I'd been fis.h.i.+ng--' It seemed to him that he had said the words a million times.

There were interruptions now and then; objections; questions from a round-faced, deep-voiced youngster, who, Robbins divined presently, was Whiting's lawyer; but all of it--the narrative, the pauses, the replies--came with the regular, effortless movement of well-oiled machinery. He could have laughed at the puerile efforts of the defense to break down his story.--'Was he sure that he knew James Whiting?' Was there a resident of Sutro who did not know him? 'Could he swear,--taking thought that he was under oath,--could he _swear_ that the man on the side of the car was James Whiting and not some other man resembling him?

If, on a moving train, another man resembling James Whiting, of about James Whiting's size--'

'He knows he can't touch me,' Robbins was thinking triumphantly. 'He knows it!'

The question of truth or falsehood was quite removed from him now. He came down from the stand finely elated, and in the afternoon went back of his own accord to the court-room. Emerson, the truck-gardener, was under examination and faring badly. One by one, the damaging facts of his past came out against him--an arrest for theft, a jail sentence for vagrancy, a quarrel with the prisoner, proved threats. The victim emerged limp from the ordeal, and slunk away from the room, wholly discredited.

'Serves him right, though,' Robbins quenched his momentary pity. 'I knew all the time he was lying.' He started suddenly, so violently that the listener seated next him turned in irritation. 'And,' it had flashed through his mind, 'and he knew I was!'

His eyes sought the prisoner--the man who also knew--where he sat hunched heavily forward in his chair, his arms upon the table. For an instant, pity, like some racking physical pain, shot through Robbins. To be caught in such a web! To be caught through no fault of his own! It was the first time the purely personal side had broken its way past his own selfish concern. It stifled him and, forcing his eyes from the man's brooding face, he got up and stumbled out of the room.

But he could not stay out. An indefinite dread dragged him back presently. An indefinite dread held him bound to his place during the examination of the witnesses who followed, during the days of argument, and the judge's inconclusive charge. He lay awake on the night following the jury's retirement, picturing over and over in his own mind the scene of their return--just what degree of astonishment his face should show in listening to their verdict, with just what proud reticence and conscious wrong he should make his way out from the crowd. He had never said that Whiting was guilty--he reminded himself of that. All he had ever said was that on one certain day, in one certain place-- He rolled over on his face and, hands across his eyes, tried vainly to sleep.

Half of Sutro was loafing about the court-house lawn next morning, pus.h.i.+ng its way into the corridors at every rumor, drifting back to the freer outer air. When at last the rumor proved a true one, Robbins found himself far in the back of the room, the wall behind him, on three sides a packed, jostling crowd. There was a blur of unintentional noise in the place--heavy breathing, the creaking of a door. Through the noise pierced at intervals the accustomed voice of the judge, and set between the intervals the mumble of the foreman's reply.

'--Agreed, all of you?'

'Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?'

The mumble dropped lower still. A stir swept over the front of the room, a wave of voiceless interest pa.s.sing from front to back.

'What--what--' Robbins stammered, straining higher on tiptoe.

'Guilty. Manslaughter,' said the man beside him. He brought his hand down heavily on the boy's shoulder. 'Suits you all right. Everybody knew--'

The gavel sounded and he broke off, bending forward to listen.

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