The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester

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"No,--now you are asking too much of me!"

"I have proof,--proof, that you went to his rooms that day!" he stormed.

"I did nothing of the sort, and I am not going to quarrel with you while
you are drunk!"

Drunk he was, but not as she understood drunkenness. In the terrible
extremity to which his crime had brought him he was having recourse to
drugs.

"You say you have proof,--don't be absurd, Marsh, you know you haven't!"
she added uneasily.

"You were with North in his rooms--" he insisted.

He was conscious of a strange wonder at himself that he could believe
this, and yet aside from such gusts of rage as these, his doubt of her
made no difference in their life together. Surely this was the measure
of his degradation.

"I am not going to discuss this matter with you!" Evelyn said.

"Aren't you? Well, I guess you will. Do you know you may be summoned
into court?"

"Why?" she demanded, with a nervous start.

"North may want to prove that he was in his rooms at the hour the
murder is supposed to have been committed; all he needs is your
testimony,--it would make a nice scandal, wouldn't it?"

"Has he asked this?" Evelyn questioned.

"Not yet!"

"Then I don't think he ever will," she said quietly.

"Do you suppose he will be fool enough to go to the penitentiary, or
hang, to save _your_ reputation?" Langham asked harshly.

"I think Jack North would be almost fool enough for that," she answered
with conviction.

"Well, I don't,--you were too easy,--men don't risk their necks for your
sort!" he mocked. "Look here, you had an infatuation for North,--you
admitted it,--only this time it went too far! What was the trouble, did
he get sick of the business and throw you over?"

"How coarse you are, Marsh!" and she colored angrily, not at his words,
however, but at the memory of that last meeting with North.

"It's a damn rotten business, and I'll call it by what name I please! If
you are summoned, it will be your word against his; you have told me you
were not in his rooms--"

"I was _not_ there--" she said, and as she said it she wondered why she
did not tell the truth, admit the whole thing and have it over with. She
was tired of the wrangling, and her hatred of North had given way to
pity, yet when Langham replied:

"All right. You are my wife, and North can hang, but he shan't save
himself by ruining you if _I_ can help it!"

She answered: "I have told you that I wasn't there, Marsh."

"Would you swear that you weren't there?" Langham asked eagerly.

"Yes--"

"Even if it sent him to the penitentiary?" he persisted.

"Yes."

He took her by the shoulders and drew her near to him that he might look
deep into her eyes.

"Even if it hanged him?" he rasped out.

She felt his hot breath on her cheek; she looked into his face, fierce,
cruel, with the insane selfishness of his one great fear.

"Answer me,--would you let him hang?" and he shook her roughly.

"Would I let him hang--" she repeated.

"Yes--"

"I--I don't know!" she said in a frightened whisper.

"No, damn you, I can't trust you!" and he flung her from him.

There was a brief silence. The intangible, unformed, unthoughtout fear
that had kept her silent was crystallizing into a very tangible
conviction. Marshall had expressed more than the mere desire to be
revenged on North, she saw that he was swayed by the mastering emotion
of fear, rather than by his blazing hate of the suspected man. Slowly
but surely there came to her an understanding of his swift descent
during the last months.

"Marsh--" she began, and hesitated.

A scarcely articulate snarl from Langham seemed to encourage her to go
on.

"Marsh, where does the money come from that you--that we--have been
spending so lavishly this winter?"

"From my practice," he said, but his face was averted.

She gave a frightened laugh.

"Oh, no, Marsh, I know better than that!"

He swung about on her.

"Well," he stormed, "what do you know?"

"Hush, Marsh!" she implored, in sudden terror of him.

He gave her a sullen glare.

"Oh, very well, bring the whole damn thing rattling down about our
ears!" he cried.

"Marsh,--what do you mean? Do you know that John North is innocent?" She
spoke with terrifying deliberation.

For a moment they stood staring into each other's eyes. The delicate
pallor deepened on her face, and she sank half fainting into a chair,
but her accusing gaze was still fixed on Langham.

He strode to her side, and his hand gripped hers with a cruel force.

"Let him prove that he is innocent if he can, but without help from
you! You keep still no matter what happens, do you hear? Or God knows
where this thing will end--or how!"

"Marsh, what am I to think!"

"You can think what you like so long as you keep still--"

There was a hesitating step in the hall, the door was pushed open, and
Judge Langham paused on the threshold.

"May I come in?" he said.

Neither spoke, and his uneasy glance shifted back and forth from husband
to wife. In that wordless instant their common knowledge manifested
itself to each one of the three.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

GOOD MEN AND TRUE

The North trial was Mount Hope's one vital sensation. Day after day the
courtroom was filled with eager perspiring humanity, while in their
homes, on the streets, and in the stores men talked of little else. As
for North himself, he was conscious of a curious sense of long
acquaintance with the courtroom; its staring white walls and crowded
benches seemed his accustomed surroundings, and here, with a feeling
that was something between fear and weariness, he followed each stage of
the elaborate game Judge Belknap, for the defense, and Moxlow, for the
prosecution, were playing, the game that had his life for its stake.

When court adjourned, always in the twilight of those mid-winter
afternoons, there were his brief comforting interviews with Elizabeth;
and then the long solitary evenings in his cell; and the longer nights,
restless and disturbed. The strain told fearfully on his vigor of body
and mind, his face under imprisonment's pallid mask, became gaunt and
heavily lined, while his eyes sunk deep in their sockets.

At first he had not believed that an innocent man could be punished for
a crime of which he had no knowledge; he was not so sure of this now,
for the days slipped past and the prosecution remained firmly intrenched
behind certain facts which were in their way, conclusive. He told
himself with grim humor that the single weak strand in the rope Moxlow
was seeking to fit about his neck was this, that after all was said and
proved, the fact remained, he had not killed Archibald McBride!

When the last witness for the state had been examined, North took the
stand in his own behalf. His cross-examination was concluded one dull
February day, and there came a brief halt in the rapid progress of the
trial; the jury was sent from the room while Moxlow and Belknap prepared
instructions and submitted them to the court. The judge listened
wearily, his sunken cheek resting against the palm of his thin hand, and
his gaze fixed on vacancy; when he spoke his voice was scarcely audible.
Once he paused in the middle of a sentence as his glance fell on the
heavy upturned face of his son, for he saw fear and entreaty written on
the close-drawn lips and in the bloodshot eyes.

A little later in the twilight North, with the sheriff at his elbow,
walked down the long corridor on his way to the jail. The end was close
at hand, a day or two more and his fate would be decided. The
hopelessness of the situation appalled him, stupified him. The evidence
of his guilt seemed overwhelming; he wondered how Elizabeth retained her
faith in him. He always came back to his thought of her, and that which
had once been his greatest joy now only filled him with despair. Why had
he ever spoken of his love,--what if this grim farce in which he was a
hapless actor blundered on to a tragic close! He would have made any
sacrifice had it been possible for him to face the situation alone, but
another life was bound up with him; he would drag her down in the ruin
that had overtaken him, and when it was all past and forgotten, she
would remember,--the horror of it would fill her days!

On that night, as on many another, North retraced step by step the ugly
path that wound its tortuous way from McBride's back office to the cell
in which he--John North--faced the gallows. But the oftener he trod this
path the more maze-like it became, until now he was hopelessly lost in
its intricacies; discouraged, dazed, confused, almost convinced that in
some blank moment of lost identity it was his hand that had sent the old
man on his long last journey. As Evelyn Langham had questioned, so now
did John North: "If not I, then who did murder Archibald McBride?"

In a vain search for the missing handy-man, General Herbert had opened
his purse wider than North or even Evelyn realized. There seemed three
possibilities in the instance of Montgomery. Either he knew McBride's
murderer and testified falsely to shield him; or else he knew nothing
and had been hired by some unknown enemy to swear North into the
penitentiary; or--and the third possibility seemed not unlikely--it was
he himself that had clambered over the shed roof after killing and
robbing the old merchant.

North turned on his cot and his thoughts turned with him from Montgomery
to Gilmore, who also, with uncharacteristic cowardliness had fled the
scene of his illegal activities and the indictment that threatened him
anew. "What was the gambler's part in the tragedy?" He hated North; he
loved Marshall Langham's wife. But neither of these passions shaped
themselves into murderous motives. Langham himself furnished food for
reflection and speculation. Evidently in the most dire financial
difficulties; evidently under Gilmore's domination; evidently burdened
with some guilty knowledge,--but there was no evidence against him, he
had credibly accounted for himself on that Thanksgiving afternoon, and
North for the hundredth time dismissed him with the exclamation: "Marsh
Langham a murderer? Impossible!"

The first cold rays of light, announcing the belated winter's dawn,
touched with gray fingers the still grayer face of the sleepless
prisoner. Out of the shadows that they coined came a vision of Evelyn
Langham. And again for the hundredth time, North was torn between the
belief that she, by her testimony, might save him and the unconquerable
determination to keep from Elizabeth Herbert the knowledge of his affair
with Langham's wife. Better end his worthless existence than touch her
fair life with this scandal. But of what was Evelyn Langham thinking
during the days of his trial? What if she should voluntarily break her
silence! Should he not send for her--there was a sound at his door.
North started to his feet only to see the fat round face of the deputy
sheriff as he came bringing the morning's hot coffee and thick buttered
bread.

The town bell was ringing for nine o'clock when the deputy sheriff again
appeared to escort him into court, and as they entered the room North
saw that it was packed to the doors. His appearance won a moment of
oppressive silence, then came the shuffling of feet and the hum of
whispered conversation.

At the back of the room sat Marshall Langham. He was huddled up in a
splint-bottomed chair a deputy had placed for him at one end of the last
row of benches. Absorbed and aloof, he spoke with no one, he rarely
moved except to mop his face with his handkerchief. His eyes were fixed
on the pale shrunken figure that bent above the judge's desk. His
father's face with its weary dignity, its unsoftened pride, possessed a
terrible fascination for him; the very memory of it, when he had quitted
the court room, haunted him! Pallid, bloodless as a bit of yellow
parchment, and tortured by suffering, it stole into his dreams at night.

But at last the end was in sight! If Moxlow had the brains he credited
him with, North would be convicted, the law satisfied, and his case
cease to be of vital interest to any one. Then of a sudden his fears
would go from him, he would be born afresh into a heritage of new hopes
and new aspirations! He had suffered to the very limit of his capacity;
there was such a thing as expiation, and surely he had expiated his
crime.

Now Moxlow, lank and awkward, with long black locks sweeping the collar
of his rusty coat, slipped from his chair and stood before the judge's
desk. For an instant Langham's glance shifted from his father to the
accused man. He felt intense hatred of him; to his warped and twisted
consciousness, half mad as he was with drink and drugs, North's life
seemed the one thing that stood between himself and safety,--and clearly
North had forfeited the right to live!

When Moxlow's even tones fell on the expectant hush, Langham writhed in
his seat. Each word, he felt, had a dreadful significance; the big linen
handkerchief went back and forth across his face as he sought to mop
away the sweat that oozed from every pore. He had gone as deep in the
prosecutor's counsels as he dared go, he knew the man's power of
invective, and his sledge-hammer force in argument; he wanted him to cut
loose and overwhelm North all in a breath! The blood in him leaped and
tingled with suppressed excitement, his twitching lips shaped themselves
with Moxlow's words. He felt that Moxlow was letting his opportunity
pass him by, that after all he was not equal to the task before him,
that it was one thing to plan and quite another to perform. Men, such as
those jurors, must be powerfully moved or they would shrink from a
verdict of guilty!

But Moxlow persevered in his level tones, he was not to be hurried. He
felt the case as good as won, and there was the taste of triumph in his
mouth, for he was going to convict his man in spite of the best criminal
lawyer in the state! Yet presently the level tones became more and more
incisive, and Moxlow would walk toward North, his long finger extended,
to loose a perfect storm of words that cut and stung and insulted. He
went deep into North's past, and stripped him bare; shabby, mean, and
profligate, he pictured those few short years of his manhood until he
became the broken spendthrift, desperately in need of money and rendered
daring by the ruin that had overtaken him.

Moxlow's speech lasted three hours, and when he ended a burning mist was
before North's eyes. He saw vaguely the tall figure of the prosecuting
attorney sink into a chair, and he gave a great sigh of relief. Perhaps
North expected Belknap to perform some miracle of vindication in his
behalf, certainly when his counsel advanced to the rail that guarded the
bench there were both authority and confidence in his manner, and soon
the dingy court room was echoing to the strident tones of the old
criminal lawyer's voice. As the minutes passed, however, it became a
certainty with North that no miracle would happen.

Belknap concluded his plea shortly before six o'clock. And this was the
end,--this was the last move in the game where his life was the stake!
In spite of his exhaustion of mind and body North had followed the
speech with the closest attention. He told himself now, that the state's
case was unshaken, that the facts, stubborn and damning, were not to be
brushed aside.

Moxlow's answer to Belknap's plea was brief, occupying little more than
half an hour, and the trial was ended. It rested with the jury 'to say
whether John North was innocent or guilty. As the jury filed from the
room North realized this with a feeling of relief in that that at last
the miserable ordeal was over. He had never been quite bereft of hope,
the consciousness of his own innocence had measurably sustained him in
his darkest hours. And now once more his imagination swept him beyond
the present into the future; again he could believe that he was to pass
from that room a free man to take his place in the world from which he
had these many weary months been excluded. There was no bitterness in
his heart toward any one, even Moxlow's harsh denunciation of him was
forgotten; the law through its bungling agents had laid its savage hands
on him, that was all, and these agents had merely done what they
conceived to be their duty.

He glanced toward the big clock on the wall above the judge's desk and
saw that thirty minutes had already gone by since the jury retired.
Another half-hour passed while he studied the face of the clock, but the
door of the jury room, near which Deputy-sheriff Brockett had taken up
his station, still remained closed and no sound came from beyond it. At
his back he heard one man whisper to another that the jurymen's dinner
had just been brought in from the hotel.

"That means another three quarters of an hour,--it's their last chance
to get a square meal at the county's expense!" the speaker added, which
earned him a neighboring ripple of laughter.

Judge Langham and Moxlow had withdrawn to the former's private room.
Sheriff Conklin touched North on the shoulder.

"I guess we'd better go back, John!" he said. "If they want us to-night
they can send for us."

Morbid and determined, the spectators settled down to wait for the
verdict. The buzz of conversation was on every hand, and the air grew
thick and heavy with tobacco smoke, while relaxed and at ease the crowd
with its many pairs of eyes kept eager watch on the door before which
Brockett kept guard. No man in the room was wholly unaffected by the
sinister significance of the deputy's presence there, and the fat little
man with his shiny bald head and stubby gray mustache, silent,
preoccupied, taking no part in what was passing about him, became as the
figure of fate.

The clock on the wall back of the judges desk ticked off the seconds;
now it made itself heard in the hush that stole over the room, again its
message was lost in the confusion of sounds, the scraping of feet or the
hum of idle talk. But whether the crowd was silent or noisy the clock
performed its appointed task until its big gilt hands told whoever cared
to look that the jury in the John North case had devoted three hours to
its verdict and its dinner.

The atmosphere of the place had become more and more oppressive. Men
nodded sleepily in their chairs, conversation had almost ceased, when
suddenly and without any apparent reason Brockett swung about on his
heel and faced the locked door. His whole expression betokened a
feverish interest. The effect of this was immediate. A wave of
suppressed excitement passed over the crowd; absolute silence followed;
and then from beyond the door, and distinctly audible in the stillness,
came the sound of a quick step on the uncarpeted floor. The clock ticked
twice, then a hand dealt the door a measured blow.

The moment of silence that followed this ominous signal was only broken
when a deputy who had been nodding half asleep in his chair, sprang
erect and hurried from the room. As the swinging baize doors banged at
his heels, the crowd seemed to breathe again.

Moxlow was the first to arrive. The deputy had found him munching a
sandwich on the court-house steps. His entrance was unhurried and his
manner quietly confident; he put aside his well-worn overcoat and took
his seat at the counsel table. A little ripple of respectful comment had
greeted his appearance; this died away when the baize doors at the back
of the room swung open again to admit North and the sheriff.

North's face was white, but he wore a look of high courage. He
understood to the full the dreadful hazard of the next few moments. With
never a glance to the right or to the left, he crossed the room and took
his seat; as he settled himself in his chair, Belknap hurried into
court.

Judge Langham had not yet appeared, and the crowd focused its attention
on the shut door leading into his private office. Presently this door
was seen to open slowly, and the judge's spare erect figure paused on
the threshold. His eyes, sunken, yet brilliant with a strange light,
shifted from side to side as he glanced over the room.

Marshall Langham had not quitted his seat. There in his remote corner
under the gallery, his blanched face framed by shadows, his father's
glance found him. With his hand resting tremulously on the jamb of the
door as if to steady himself, the judge advanced a step. Once more his
eyes strayed in the direction of his son, and from the gloom of that
dull corner which Marshall had made his own, despair and terror called
aloud to him. His shaking hand dropped to his side, and then like some
pale ghost, he passed slowly before the eager eyes that were following
his every movement to his place behind the flat-topped desk on the
raised dais.

As he sank into his chair he turned to the clerk of the court and there
was a movement of his thin lips, but no sound passed them. Brockett
guessed the order he had wished to give, and the big key slid around in
the old-fashioned lock of the jury-room door. Heavy-visaged and
hesitating, the twelve men filed into court, and at sight of them John
North's heart seemed to die within his breast. He no longer hoped nor
doubted, he knew their verdict,--he was caught in some intricate web of
circumstance! A monstrous injustice was about to be done him, and in the
very name of justice itself!

The jurors, awkward in their self-consciousness, crossed the room and,
as intangible as it was potent, a wave of horror went with them. There
was a noisy scraping of chairs as they took their seats, and then a
deathlike silence.

The clerk glanced up inquiringly into the white face that was bent on
him. A scarcely perceptible inclination of the head answered him, and he
turned to the jury.

"Gentlemen, have you arrived at a true verdict, and chosen one of your
number to speak for you?" he asked.

Martin Howe, the first man in the front row of the two solemn lines of
jurors, came awkwardly to his feet and said almost in a whisper:

"We have. We find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment."

"Mr. Howe, do you find this man guilty as charged in the indictment?"
asked the clerk.

"I do," responded the juror.

Twelve times the clerk of the court, calling each man by name, asked
this question, and one by one the jurors stood up and answered:

"I do."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE LAST APPEAL

One raw morning late in April, Mark Leanard, who worked at Kirby's
lumber-yard, drove his team of big grade Percherons up to Kirby's office
by the railroad tracks.

"What's doing?" he asked of Kirby's clerk.

The clerk handed him a slip of paper.

"Go round and tell Mitchell to get you out this load!" he said.

Leanard went off whistling, with the order slip tucked back of his
hatband. In the yard, Mitchell the foreman, gave him a load "of
sixteen-foot" pine boards and "two by fours".

"Where to?" the driver asked, as he took his seat on top the load.

"To the jail, they're going to fence the yard."

"You mean young John North?"

"That's what,--did you think you'd get a day off and take the old woman
and the kids?" asked Mitchell.

It was a little past eight when the teamster entered the alley back of
the jail and began to unload. The fall of the first heavy plank took
John North to his cell window. For a long breathless moment he stood
there peering down into the alley, then he turned away.

All that day the teams from Kirby's continued to bring lumber for the
fence, and at intervals North heard the thud of the heavy planks as they
were thrown from the wagons, or the voices of the drivers as they urged
their horses up the steep grade from the street. Darkness came at last
and with it unbroken quiet, but in his troubled slumbers that night the
condemned man saw the teams come and go, and heard the fall of the
planks. It was only when the dawn's first uncertain light stole into the
cell that a dreamless sleep gave him complete forgetfulness.

From this he was presently roused by hearing the sound of voices in the
yard, and then the sharp ringing blows of a hammer. He quitted his bed
and slipped to the window; two carpenters had already begun building the
frame work that was to carry the temporary fence which would inclose the
place of execution. It was _his_ fence; it would surround his gallows
that his death should not become a public spectacle.

As they went about their task, the two carpenters stole covert glances
up in the direction of his window, but North stood well back in the
gloom of his cell and was unseen. Horror could add nothing to the prison
pallor, which had driven every particle of color from his cheeks. Out of
these commonplace details was to come the final tragedy. Those men in
faded overalls were preparing for his death,--a limit had been fixed to
the very hours that he might live. On the morning of the tenth of June
he would see earth and sky from that window for the last time!

Chance passers-by with no very urgent affairs of their own on hand,
drifted up from the street, and soon a little group had assembled in the
alley to watch the two carpenters at their work, or to stare up at
North's strongly barred window. Now and again a man would point out this
window to some new-corner not so well informed as himself.

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