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  “And then what did you do?” asked Henry.

  “I calls in Constable McCrearity, who’s settin’ right over there alongside o’ Lindell, and we interviews Lindell pretty closely. She claims that she don’t know nothin’ about it. She claims that a woman pedlar come to the house that day sellin’ sewin’ thread an’ needles, an’ the woman bein’ faint she let her lie down on the couch a while in the settin’ room while she run across the street to see how Johnny Baker was after his fall out o’ the apple tree. But no pedlar, man or woman, could have guessed exactly where I kep’ that diamon’ ring, an’ I knowed it too. I up and got hot, and called in Constable McCrearity and demanded that he make a search o’ Lindell’s things.”

  “That is, you suspected the defendant?” said Henry. “And you made a formal accusation?”

  Zelina nodded. The girl in the prisoner’s box looked white and pained, as though at an unpleasant recollection.

  “First thing he comes to, searchin’ over the pockets of her spring jacket, that giddy red thing she bought with that money she earned from me, that jacket no self-respecting girl would wear — a jacket like a painted woman would wear — was a hard lump where somethin’ was sewed up in the corner.”

  “Tell the jury what you found therein?”

  “I found my diamon’ ring, the selfsame ring that Amos bought me in 1904, with the selfsame engravin’s in it, ‘From Amos to Zelina’: found it in that there girl’s red jacket, a-sewed up.”

  “Will you show the jury the object, and state the cost of it? But I believe you have done so. Two hundred dollars, did you not say?”

  Zelina took from her handbag a tiny object which sparkled in the morning sunlight. Fat Winter in silence carried it over to the jury-box. It was passed from hand to hand amid tense silence in the court-room and then carried back. Henry White nodded to the witness.

  “You are excused.” He bowed to his confrère across the table, and added — “to the defence.”

  “Cross-examination is waived by the defence,” was the defence’s only statement, in a low voice.

  Zelina Miles climbed down from her wooden chair.

  “Call the next witness for the State,” ordered Henry White.

  “Constable John McCrearity,” intoned Fat through his nose.

  The grey-bearded lock-up keeper and constable ascended the stand. His interrogation was short and quickly answered.

  “What did the defendant do when you took her into custody?”

  “She cried,” said old McCrearity, “and said that the woman pedlar must have taken the ring and sewed it up into her jacket while she was gone from the house.”

  Henry smiled a supercilious smile, and McCrearity, excused, pausing a moment to hear once more the defence waiving its cross-examination of him, stepped down from the witness-stand.

  Old Judge Hibbard, staring down at the lawyers’ table through his gold-rimmed glasses, asked one question:

  “Will the defence call its witnesses?”

  Crosby, speaking in the same low voice that had characterized his only two utterances thus far, looked up at Hibbard. “The defence has no witnesses.”

  A silence filled the court-room. Henry White arose.

  He turned to the jury. He spoke rapidly, fumbling at his batwing collar, and his speech, although in places theatrical, was that of a man who has been long in the courts. He spoke easily and fluently of the viper in our midst, the viper we took to our bosom, the viper who turned and stung us. He dilated at some length on the biblical injunction against theft. He rose to oratory at the end, and his final utterances were met by the craning necks of the grizzled old farmers in the jury-box, some of whom forgot to chew on their cuds. Two of them nodded as though in approval. A buzz of comment ran through the court-room.

  David Crosby stood up. He placed his right hand between the first and second buttons of his coat, and addressed himself, as had Henry White, to the jurymen.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “my speech to you all will be of brief duration. My eminent colleague, Mr. White, speaks of the sanctity of the law, of the consumer of our crusts who has violated the friendliness of our sheltering roof. But to you all he says nothing in regard to the fact that the crime of which this girl has been accused is her first offence.” He shook his long hair fiercely back from his forehead. “Let us entirely disregard the mere technicality that she has pleaded not guilty in this court with her own lips. Not one of us but would have done the same. Let us consider matters in the light of her past history. This girl was reared in an orphan asylum, without mother or father to guide her. She has always, up to this time, been a worthy citizen of our good town. That she fell once to temptation does not mean an inherent badness. This girl has been an industrious worker among us: and because a girl’s hungry eyes are carried away by a glittering bauble the like of which she knows that she can never possess on her meagre wage is a factor of psychology — psychology, I say — which we must allow for. Gentlemen, I say to you, earnestly, let us bring in a verdict of not guilty.”

  Henry White’s concluding speech lasted but two minutes, and consisted of several vicious short-arm jabs with respect to the theory of law in general. Law was law, declared Henry, and it was the one and only thing that differentiated us from the savages from which we sprung; and if law were disregarded in favour of sentiment, then straight into anarchism we were headed, and straight into anarchism we would finally land, where no man would own his wife nor his dwelling-place.

  Instructions to the jury, after Henry White had plumped down into his chair, were brief to the extreme. “The facts and the law are before you, gentlemen,” said he of the cud and the gold-rimmed glasses. “If you find the defendant guilty of unlawfully appropriatin’ the object shown to you, valued at 200 dollars, this court hasn’t no other choice but fixin’ the penalty given in our statute books for grand larceny in the State o’ Kansas. This defendant bein’ o’ legal age that penalty is fixed at no less’n one year in the penitentiary an’ no more ‘n five. That’s all, gentlemen.”

  The foreman of the jury, Zeb Potter, arose, after deliberation, and announced their verdict.

  “We find the defendant guilty as charged,” were his words, “but recommend the honourable court to impose the minimum sentence that the statute books provide.”

  The girl in the prisoner’s box gave a long-drawn-out gasp — then leaned back weak and faint against her seat. The long tension of the moment was broken by the voice of Fat rapping out, “O-order in the co-ort,” as an excited buzz of comment and talking ascended, together with the loud shuffling of feet as certain individuals rose to get back to their various occupations, quite deserted this morning.

  In the little cell-like ante-room for prisoners, with its one window that looked out on Brossville’s main street, Crosby found Lindell ten minutes later after his last stumbling formalities of polling the jury had been complied with, and the court-room was at last devoid of juror and judge, spectator and prosecutor. She was standing by the window gazing out. McCrearity was at her side, clumsily holding her jacket for her.

  “Lindell,” the younger man said in a low voice, “it — it — the verdict — makes no difference to me. None whatever. I love you just the same. After those instructions from the jury, Judge Hibbard can only impose the minimum sentence. It will mean only a year, dear, and that will reduce to eleven months. And when the sen — when the eleven months are over, I will come for you and will call this a black page in our life, to be forgotten for ever in a little home of our own. We will go to a new town. We — ”

  The girl spoke. Her voice was the voice of irony tempered by bitter reproach.

  “David, you were my attorney. It was your duty to make some defence of me, your client. I could have loved you so — so much if you had fought for me — if you had even believed in me — had done your best — the best that is in a lawyer for his client. But now — now — now — ” With wet eyes she thrust out a restraining hand as he stepped across
the short space between them in the little room. “No, no, no, do not come near me. I am convicted of a crime, and — and — sentenced — sentenced to the penitentiary.” She turned to old McCrearity. Her brown eyes filled with a sudden flood of blinding tears. “Constable McCrearity, please, please take me away.”

  And David Crosby found himself standing all alone in the gloomy little ante-room, staring dazedly out at the dusty road that wound past the temple of justice and righteousness.

  CHAPTER III

  “YOU’LL NEVER MAKE NO LAWYER, DAVID”

  DAVID CROSBY, sitting alone in his office in the Jones Building, raised his head sharply as the decrepit phone on the wall tinkled its call. The daily leaf calendar on the wall showed the date to be December 29, 1923, and the old boxwood clock on the desk, with its hands pointing at ten o’clock, showed that two more hours would herald a new day.

  As the bell again tinkled, Crosby rose hastily, just a little puzzled as to why his phone should ring at ten in the evening, and, mopping back from a face which had grown thinner from hard study a thatch of light brown hair, strode over to the instrument and raised the nickel receiver.

  “Hello!”

  “Crosby? David Crosby?”

  “Yes. Attorney Crosby speaking.”

  “This is Dr. Duff.”

  “Oh — why — hello, doctor! How is Zelina to-night?”

  “Zelina is sinking fast, Crosby. She’s dying. I want you to get over here at once, David. Zelina has something on her mind. Wants to talk to you. It’s a question of coming quick. Amos wants you too. Will you make it?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there at once.” He hung up.

  He lost no time. Taking down from the wall a long cheap ulster overcoat, he buttoned himself carefully in and clambered down the creaky stairs of the old draughty Jones Building into the night air.

  Head on against the wind, he made his way, and ten minutes later turned in at a small white cottage with snow-encrusted fence and icicle-covered porch. He did not need to knock, for the door was opened by his half-brother, Amos Miles, lamp in hand, in shirt-sleeves, his face haggard, who peered out at his visitor. “Come in, Dave,” he directed in a low voice.

  He led the way to a tiny bedroom off the hall. An odour of drugs pervaded the hallway, and inside on a stand were the usual array of nauseous medicine bottles: the lamp casting its sickly glare over the bare room, the old-fashioned bureau with its marble top. And on the bed lay the woman who three months before had mounted the witness-stand in Judge Hibbard’s court, even then thin, scrawny, bony — but to-night a veritable skeleton, the sallow skin drawn like parchment over the skull, the eyes deep and piercing and burning, the fingers clawing away at the coverlid.

  The burning eyes riveted themselves on Crosby as he entered the room and crossed quickly to the bedside. Old Dr. Duff stepped aside, stroking his white beard troubledly.

  The drawn skin over Zelina’s skull broke into the semblance of a smile. She turned her head weakly towards Dr. Duff. “David’s here now, doctor, an’ I must talk. I must talk. I must!”

  “Just a little then, Zelina,” said old Duff. “Do you want to talk to David alone?”

  “No, no, no,” said the sick woman. “I want you” — she turned her head very slightly towards her husband — “and you, too, Amos, to stay.” She pointed, half nodded at the rickety chair by the bed. “Set down, David.”

  “David,” said the sick woman fiercely, with a burst of energy as though the last fires of the furnace of life were flaring up in an attempt to consume the very furnace itself, “that girl — that girl — Lindell — never stole that diamond ring.”

  “Never stole that — ” repeated Crosby dazedly, but the sick woman stopped him with a flicker of a gesture of a thin hand. Her voice went on, weak, wavering, yet to the point. “No, David, Lindell Trent never took that diamond ring. I’m goin’ fast. I’m — I’m sinkin’, an’ I can’t go over the dark river without clearin’ my soul. Oh God,” she wailed, “what have I done to Thee? Oh, forgive me.”

  A tense silence followed, in which the three men looked at each other embarrassedly.

  “David,” said the sick woman suddenly, “I — I was jealous. “She turned fiercely to her husband. “Oh, Amos, you made so much over Lindell — you talked to her so much at the table — you was with her so much that I thought you — you didn’t care for me no more. I — Oh, Amos, I — I was wild crazy. I thought after all these years — ”

  “There, there, now, Zeliny, don’t get excited,” cautioned her husband tenderly. “Lindell warn’t nothin’ to me, Z’liny. She jes’ made me think of a little datter like I allus wanted — that’s all. You were always my girl.”

  “Oh, Amos, why — why didn’t you tell me that, then?” She stopped and appeared to sink into a doze.

  David Crosby, his head roaring as though filled with a thousand cataracts and falls, was the one who broke the silence. “Zelina, Zelina! you say Lindell never took it?”

  “I be’n a bad woman, a wicked woman, an’ I got to make my peace before I meet my Maker. I — I was crazy jealous o’ Lindell. I never thought no jury’d convict her o’ crime. I never had a night’s sleep sence. I thought she’d be drove out o’ town, instid o’ arrested, but that Henry White went an’ put th’ case afore that gran’ jury that was settin’ on the hoss-stealin’ case, an’ got a — a — a — indictment. An’ then he prosecuted her, an’ I had to stand by my story. I — I never thought they’d do anything but drive her away. I never thought the jury would vote her guilty.” She paused, evidently for breath. “I’m gettin’ weak. I must tell it. I — I must tell it. I never went to Prairie City that day. I went to Reedtown, instid. The night afore I went, I — I sewed up thet ring in the little girl’s red jacket, an’ next mornin’ I took the train for Reedtown where there was a carnival playin’. I lef’ Reedtown at 3.40, and come on home. Then I accused the little girl o’ takin’ the ring, and called in Constable McCrearity. That’s all.” A profound silence filled the room. The sick woman turned fiercely on Crosby. “David, I be’n a wicked woman. Why, oh why, David, didn’t you ask me questions on that witness-stand? Why didn’t you show me up the liar that I was? Better I be hounded out o’ town than that I got to go to my Maker after what I done to Lindell Trent. Why, David, I never lef’ the road that runs from Brossville to Reedtown where the carnival was. The — ”

  “The Texas and Southern,” put in her husband for her.

  “Yes,” said the sick woman. “If I’d gone to Prairie City that day, David, as I said on th’ witness-stand, instid o’ sneakin’ up to Reedtown to take in the sights o’ that wicked carnival, I’d a-had to change cars both comin’ and goin’ at Pott’s Junction, so’s to get on to the Kansas an’ Western. I’d a-got to Prairie City all right, but I’d a never got back again that night account th’ washout — ”

  “The washout!” ejaculated David Crosby.

  The sick woman gave a short, hard laugh. “David, you won’t never make no lawyer. You’re too easy, David. You’re too willin’ to let a wicked woman like me lie and succeed. No, David, that there bridge over Mills Creek went down at noontime that day, and the train that was to get into Pott’s Junction jes’ ten minutes before the Texas and Southern never got there at all. If I’d a-gone to Prairie City, I couldn’t a-made connections. I couldn’t a-got back at all that there day I said.” This last statement seemed to consume all of the woman’s strength.

  “When did you first learn about the washout, Zelina?” asked the young attorney in a faint voice.

  “I noticed there weren’t no passengers waitin’ on the platform at Pott’s Junction that day,” said the sick woman, “but I never learned the reason till long after they sent Lindell Trent away. I — I — well, I was readin’ some old Prairietown Gazettes about a week after Lindell was sent away. An’ in the October 2nd Gazette it told about there bein’ no chance for the trains to get by that creek after — after noontime the day before.” She stopped as though compl
etely exhausted by her efforts to pour forth her story.

  “Then if I had checked up your movements on that day, Zelina, and investigated; if I had even cross-questioned you on the witness-stand, I could have broken your story completely?”

  The sick woman nodded. “You coulda broken it, David. I never were no hand at tellin’ a lie an’ gettin’ things straight. I wish to God you had, David.” She turned fiercely to the other two. “You all heard? You all heard? It was me. I done it. I done it. And Lindell Trent is servin’ a year in th’ penitentiary for it.”

  Dr. Duff stepped forward and felt the sick woman’s pulse. Then he shook his head. “You did the right thing, Zelina, to talk, and you’ll feel better for it. Yes, we all heard. Now you must be quiet.” He turned to David. “I think you’d better go, David. She must rest for a while, now.”

  Out in the hall, Crosby, his face white, buttoned himself into his great-coat, Amos Miles troubledly holding the lamp. “I’m sorry, Dave. It’s tumble. O’ course we’ll right th’ wrong done to that pore gal at once. Pore, pore Z’liny.”

  “Yes.” Crosby turned the handle of the door. “I’ll be in again to-morrow, Amos.”

  And out into the night he went, face against the snow, his brain beating a tattoo against the top of his skull. He did not turn his footsteps back to the little office in the Jones Building. Instead he pierced his way through the wind and snow to the tiny railroad station of Brossville, situated on the Texas and Southern Kansas line. There inside, he found the telegrapher, a new chap, pounding away at his key with a green celluloid shade over his eyes and a half-opened bright red novel at his elbow. The latter nodded to Crosby, evidently recognizing him as one of the town’s citizens. Crosby looked at his cheap silver watch. “There’s a T. and S. K. train through here at midnight, isn’t there, that reaches the State Penitentiary at Leavenworth around morning?”