“When I’m certain of that I shall go away.
Not before, Wallie.”
He jerked again, rather dreadfully.
“Not if I ask you to go?” he said.
“Why should you ask me to go?”
“Because I don’t think you are safe here.”
“Who could have any design against me?
I have no enemies; no actively murderous ones anyhow.
I mind my own business and my conscience is as clear as the ordinary run of consciences.
Why should I run away?”
“I’m telling you. That’s all. Get away, and get Judy away.”
“Then you know something I don’t know, and it is your business to tell me what it is.”
He refused to be drawn, however, and with all the questions I had in mind, managed to get away before I could ask him any of them.
Save one, and that had a curious effect on him.
“Can you tell me,” I said, “why Mary Martin suggested to Judy that your father should not be left alone at night?”
“Because he was sick.
That’s enough, isn’t it?
Why try to read into this case something that isn’t there?
And why drag her in?
She has nothing to do with the case.
Absolutely nothing.
She’s as innocent as—as Judy.”
I made my decision then, to tell him the facts as to his father’s death.
I told him as gently as I could, with my hand on his arm.
But he showed no surprise and pretended none.
Save that he grew a shade paler he kept himself well in hand.
I felt then that he had been certain of it from the day Howard died.
Jim was arraigned a day or so later.
It was a hideous ordeal for him, and for the rest of us; the courtroom crowded, and the crowd hostile.
It seemed to me that the concentrated hatred in that room was a menace in itself, that if thought is a force, as I believe that it is, there was enough malignancy there to have destroyed a man.
They had brought him from the jail in the Black Maria; very carefully dressed, he was, and holding his head high.
He had not come alone. There were criminals with him, black and white and even one yellow man.
He had to wait while they entered their pleas, and he fixed his eyes on Katherine.
I saw her smile at him, and her whole face warmed.
A queer woman, Katherine, filled with surprises.
He listened gravely to the reading of the indictment, and nodded a sort of mute thank-you to the clerk when he had finished.
I saw him draw a long breath, and I fancy he had meant that his
“Not guilty” was to be a full-bodied and manly thing, a ringing assertion of his innocence.
But he failed.
At the last moment he looked at the crowd, and its concentrated hatred struck him like a blow in the chest.
I saw his spirit fall under it and lie there, a broken thing, and Judy moaned a little.
His
“Not guilty” was not heard beyond the front benches, and he knew it.
Some hysterical woman somewhere giggled, and he heard it.
I have never seen such torture in a man’s face.
When they took him out he stopped at the prisoners’ door, as though he would come back and face them down, but Godfrey Lowell put a hand on his arm, and he went out to face again the battery of news photographers waiting outside.
I have one of those pictures now.
It shows him handcuffed to another prisoner and with his head bent.
The other man is smiling.
Chapter Twenty