Somebody, it appeared, had sinned against old Isom Chase at the end, and Joe Newbolt knew who that person was. Here he had stood before them all and lifted up a wall of stubborn silence to shield the guilty head, and there was no doubt that it was his own.
That also was the opinion of the coroner"s jury, which walked out from its deliberations in the kitchen in a little while and gave as its verdict that Isom Chase had come to his death by a gunshot wound, inflicted at the hands of Joseph Newbolt. The jury recommended that the accused be held to the grand jury, for indictment or dismissal.
Mrs. Newbolt did not understand fully what was going forward, but she gathered that the verdict of the neighbors was unfriendly to Joe. She sat looking from the coroner to Joe, from Joe to the jurors, lined up with backs against the wall, as solemn and nervous as if waiting for a firing squad to appear and take aim at their patriotic b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She stood up in her bewilderment, and looked with puzzled, dazed expression around the room.
"Joe didn"t do it, if that"s what you mean," said she.
"Madam--" began the coroner severely.
"Yes, you little whiffet," she burst out sharply, "you"re the one that put "em up to do it! Joe didn"t do it, I tell you, and you men know that as well as I do. Every one of you has knowed him all his life!"
"Madam, I must ask you not to interrupt the proceedings," said the coroner.
"Order in the court!" commanded the constable in his deepest official voice.
"Oh, shut your fool mouth, Bill Frost!" said Mrs. Newbolt scornfully.
"Never mind, Mother," counseled Joe. "I"ll be all right. They have to do what they"re doing, I suppose."
"Yes, they"re doin" what that little snip-snapper with them colored whiskers tells "em to do!" said she.
Solemn as the occasion was, a grin went round at the bald reference to a plainer fact. Even the dullest there had seen the grayish-red at the roots of the coroner"s beard. The coroner grew very red of face, and gave some orders to his stenographer, who wrote them down. He thanked the jurors and dismissed them. Bill Frost began to prepare for the journey to Shelbyville to turn Joe over to the sheriff.
The first, and most important, thing in the list of preliminaries for the journey, was the proper adjustment of Bill"s mustache. Bill roached it up with a turn of the forefinger, using the back of it, which was rough, like a corn-cob. When he had got the ends elevated at a valiant angle, his hat firmly settled upon his head, and his suspenders tightened two inches, he touched Joe"s shoulder.
"Come on!" he ordered as gruffly and formally as he could draw his edged voice.
Joe stood, and Bill put his hand on his arm to pilot him, in all officiousness, out of the room. Mrs. Newbolt stepped in front of them as they approached.
"Joe!" she cried appealingly.
"That"s all right, Mother," he comforted her, "everything will be cleared up and settled in a day or two. You go on home now, Mother, and look after things till I come."
"Step out of the way, step out of the way!" said Bill with spreading impatience.
Mrs. Newbolt looked at the bl.u.s.tering official pityingly.
"Bill Frost, you ain"t got as much sense as you was born with!" said she. She patted Joe"s shoulder, which was as near an approach to tenderness as he ever remembered her to make.
Constable Frost fell into consultation with his adjutant, Sol Greening, as soon as he cleared the room with the prisoner. They discussed gravely in the prisoner"s hearing, for Bill kept his hand on Joe"s arm all the time, the advisability of tying him securely with a rope before starting on the journey to jail.
Joe grew indignant over this base proposal. He declared that if Bill was afraid of him he would go alone to the county-seat and give himself up to the sheriff if they would set him free. Bill was a little a.s.sured by his prisoner"s evident sincerity.
Another consultation brought them to the agreement that the best they could do, in the absence of handcuffs, was to hitch up to Isom"s buggy and make the prisoner drive. With hands employed on the lines, he could be watched narrowly by Bill who was to take Sol"s old navy six along in his mighty hand.
Mrs. Newbolt viewed the officious constable"s preparations for the journey with many expressions of anger and disdain.
"Just look at that old fool, Bill Frost, with that revolver!" said she, turning to the neighbors, who stood silently watching. "Just as if Joe would hurt anybody, or try to run away!"
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.