After a moment's reconnoitering, he scaled the frost-fretted iron palings and gained the shelter of the porch. He tried the key anxiously; to his relief it fitted. Another minute and he stood in the study, the door locked behind him, his veins beating with excitement.

He felt along the wall, drawing his hand back sharply as it encountered the electric switch. He struck a wax _fusee_ and by its feeble ray gazed about him. The room looked as it had always looked, with Harry's books on the shelves, and his heavy walking-stick in the corner, and there against the wall stood the substantial iron safe that held his own ransom. Crouching down before it, he took from his pocket the paper upon which was written the combination; ten to the right, five to the left, twice nineteen to the right--

The match scorched his fingers, and he lighted another and began to turn the k.n.o.b. The lock bore both figures and letters in concentric rings, and he saw that the seven figures Harry had written formed a word. Hugh dropped the match with a smothered exclamation, for the word was Jessica! So Harry really had loved her in the old days! Had he profited by that wedding-day expulsion to make love to her himself? Yet on the night of the game with Harry in the chapel the house in the aspens had been closed and dark. How had she come to be in Smoky Mountain? His father was dead--so Harry had said. If so, the money had gone to her, no doubt. Well, at any rate, she had never been anything to him and he was no dog-in-the-manger. What he needed now was the thousand dollars, and here it was. He swung the ma.s.sive door wide and took out the canvas bag.

With this and the ruby ring--it must easily be worth as much again--he could put the round world between himself and capture.

He closed the safe, and with the bag of coin in his hand, groped his way to the door of the chapel. It was less dark there, for the snow was making a white night outside, and the stained gla.s.s cast a wan glimmer across the aisles. He could almost see himself and Harry Sanderson sitting in the candle-light at the communion table inside the altar-rail, almost hear the musical c.h.i.n.k of the gold! His hand wandered to his pocket, where lay the one wax wafer he had kept as a pocket-piece. At that altar he had sworn to pay a day of clean living for each of the counters he had lost. He had not kept that oath, and now vengeance was near to overtaking him. He shuddered. He had turned over a new leaf this time in earnest, and he would make up for the broken vow!

But meanwhile he greatly needed sleep, and to-night in the open that was out of the question. He could gain several good hours' rest where he was, and still get away before daybreak. He drew together the altar-cushions and lay down, the canvas bag beside him, but he was cold, and at length he rose and went into the vestry for a surplice. He wrapped this about him, and, lighting a cigarette, lay down again. He was very tired, but his limbs twitched from nervousness. He lighted one cigarette after another, but sleep was coy. He tried to woo it with nonsense rhymes, but the lines ran together. He tried the remedy of his restless, precocious childhood--the counting of innumerable sheep as they leaped the hurdle one by one; but now all of the sheep were black.

There came before his eyes, uncalled, the portrait of his dead mother, that had always hung at home in the wainscoted library. In her memory his father had built this very chapel. He wondered again whether she had looked like the picture.

A softer feeling came to him. She would be sorry if she could know his plight. Perhaps if she had lived his life might have been different.

Slow tears stole down his cheeks--not now of affected sentimentalism, or of hysterical self-pity, but warmer drops from some deeper well that had not overflowed since he was a little boy. If he had the chance he would live from now on so that if she were alive she need not be ashamed! The promise he made himself at that moment was an honester one than all his selfish years had known, for it sprang not from dread, but from the better feeling that his maturity had trampled and denied. He felt a kind of peace--the first real peace he had known since his school-days--and with it drowsiness came at last. With the drops wet on his cheek, forgetfulness found him. In a few minutes he was sleeping heavily.

The last half-consumed cigarette dropped from his relaxing fingers to the cushion, where it made a smoldering nest of fire. A tiny tongue of flame caught the edge of a wall-hanging, ran up to the dry oaken rafters and speedily ignited them. In fifteen minutes the interior of the chapel was a ma.s.s of flame, and Hugh woke gasping and bewildered.

With a cry of alarm he sprang to his feet, seized the bag of coin and ran to the door of the study. In his haste he stumbled against it, and the dead-lock snapped to. He was a prisoner now, for he had left the skeleton-key in the inside of the outer door. Clutching his treasure, he ran to the main entrance; it was fast. He tried the smaller windows; iron bars were set across them. He made shift to wrap the surplice about his mouth, against the stifling smoke and fiery vapors. The bag dropped from his hand and the gold rolled about the floor. He stooped and clutched a handful of the coins and crammed them into his pocket. Was he to die after all like this, caught like a rat in a trap? In his panic of terror he forgot all necessity of concealment; he longed for nothing so much as discovery by those whose cries he now heard filling the waking street. Many voices were swelling the clamor there. Bells were pealing a terror-tongued alarm, but those on the spot saw that the structure was doomed. Hugh screamed desperately, but the roar of the flames overhead and the angry crackling of the woodwork drowned all else. The roof timbers were snapping, the m.u.f.fling surplice was scorching, a thousand luminous points about him were bursting into fire in the sickening heat. He pounded with all his might upon the door panels, but in vain.

Who outside could have imagined that a human being was pent within that fiery furnace?

Uttering a hoa.r.s.e cry, with the strength of despair, Hugh wrenched a pew from the floor and made of it a ladder to reach the rose-window.

Mounting this, he beat frantically with his fist upon the painted gla.s.s.

The crystal shivered beneath the blows, and clinging to the iron supports, his beard burnt to the skin, he set his face to the aperture and drew a gulping breath of the sweet, cold air. In his agony, with that fiery h.e.l.l opening beneath him, he could see the ma.s.sed people watching from the safety that was so near.

"Look! Look!" The sudden cry went up, and a thrill of awe ran through the crowd. The gla.s.s Hugh had shattered had formed the face of the Penitent Thief in the window-design, and his outstretched arms fitted those of the figure. It was as though by some ghastly miracle the painted features had suddenly sprung into life, the haggard eyes opened in appeal. The watchers gasped in amazement.

The flame was upon him now. He was going to his last account--with no time to alter the record. But had not his sleeping vow been one of reformation? He tried to shriek this to the deaf heavens, but all the spellbound watchers heard was the cry: "Lord, Lord, remember--" And this articulate prayer from the crucified malefactor filled them with a superst.i.tious horror. In the crowd more than one covered his face with his hands.

All at once there came a shout of warning. The wall opened outward, tottered and fell.

Then it was that they saw the writhing figure, tangled in the twisted lead bars of the wrecked rose-window. Shielding their faces from the unendurable heat, they reached and bore it to safety, laying it on the crisp, snowy gra.s.s, and tearing off the singed and smoking ministerial robes.

Judge Conwell was one of these. In the flaring confusion he leaned over the figure--the gleam of the ruby ring on the finger caught his eye. He bent forward to look into the drawn and distorted face.

"Good G.o.d!" he said. "It's Harry Sanderson!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

A DAY FOR THE STATE

In communities such as Smoky Mountain the law moves with fateful rapidity. Harry had been formally arraigned the second morning after his self-surrender and had pleaded not guilty. The Grand Jury was in session--indeed, had about finished its labors--and there had been no reason for delay. All necessary witnesses for the state were on the ground, and Felder for his part had no others to summon. So that when Doctor Brent, one keen forenoon, swung himself off a Pullman at the station, returning from his ten days' absence, he found the town thrilling with the excitement of the first day of the trial. Before he left the station, he had learned of Prendergast's death and accusation and knew that Tom Felder had come to the prisoner's defense.

Doctor Brent had taken no stock in the young lawyer's view of Hugh Stires. The incident that they had witnessed on the mountain road--it had troubled him during his trip--had been to him only another chapter in the hackneyed tragedy of romantic womanhood flattered by a rascal.

He was inclined now to lay the championship as much to interest in Jessica as in the man who had won her love.

He walked thoughtfully to his friend's deserted office, and leaving his suit-case there, betook himself to the filled court-room, where Smoky Mountain had gathered to watch Felder's fight for the life and liberty of the man who for days past had been the center of interest. The court had opened two hours before and half the jury had been selected. He found a seat with some difficulty, and thereafter his attention was given first to the bench where the prisoner sat, and second to a chair close to the railing beside Mrs. Halloran's, where a girl's face glimmered palely under a light veil.

Toward this chair the hundreds of eyes in the room that morning had often turned. Since the day Mrs. Halloran had surprised Jessica at work upon the rock statue, she had kept her counsel, but as the physician had conjectured, the monument had been stumbled upon and had drawn curious visitors. Thus the name on the grave had become common property and the coincidence had been chattered of. That Jessica had chiselled the statue was not doubted--she had bought the tools in town, and old Paddy Wise, the blacksmith, had sharpened them for her. The story Prendergast had told in the general store, too, had not been forgotten, and the aid she had given the fever-stricken man had acquired a new significance in face of the knowledge that she had more than once been admitted to the jail with Felder. No one in Smoky Mountain would have ventured to "pump" the lawyer, and the town had been too mindful of its manners to catechize her, but it had buzzed with theories. From the moment of the opening of the trial she had divided interest with the prisoner.

The first appearance of the latter, between two deputies, had caused a murmur of surprise. In the weeks of wholesome toil and mountain air, the sallow, haggard look that Harry had brought to the town had gradually faded; his step had grown more elastic, his cheek ruddier, his eye a clearer blue. The scar on his temple had become less noticeable. Day by day, he had been growing back to the old look. The beard and mustache now were gone; the face they saw was smooth-shaven, calm, alien and absorbed. He had bowed slightly to the judge, shaken hands gravely with Felder and sat down with a quick, flashing smile at the quivering face behind the veil. He had seemed of all there the one who had least personal concern in the deliberations that were forward. Yet beneath that mask of calmness Harry's every nerve was stretched, every sense restive.

In the interviews he had had with his client, Felder had been puzzled and nonplussed. To tell the truth, when he had first come to his defense it had been not with a conviction of his innocence, but with a belief in the present altered character that made the law's penalty seem excessive and supererogatory; in fine, that whatever he might have deserved when he did it--a.s.suming that he did it--he did not deserve hanging now. But the man's manner had made him lean more and more upon an a.s.sumption of actual innocence. In the end, while discarding Jessica's reasoning, he had accepted her conclusion. The man was certainly guiltless. Since this time, he had felt his position keenly. It had been one thing to do the very best possible for a presumptively guilty man--to get him off against the evidence if he could; it was a vastly different thing to defend one whom he believed actually guiltless against d.a.m.ning circ.u.mstance.

With the filling of the jury-box the court adjourned for an hour and Doctor Brent saw the two women's figures disappear with Felder into a side room, while the prisoner was taken in charge by the deputies. The doctor lunched hastily at the Mountain Valley House, irritated out of his usual urbanity by the chatter of the crowded dining-room, realizing then how busy gossip had been with Jessica's name. He walked back to the court-room moodily smoking.

The afternoon session commenced with a concise opening by the district attorney; Felder's reply was as brief, and the real business of the day began with the witnesses for the state.

Circ.u.mstantially speaking, the evidence was flawless. Doctor Moreau, while little known and less liked, had figured in the town as a promoter and an inventor of "slick" stock schemes. He had come there with Hugh Stires, from Sacramento, where they had had a business partnership--of short duration. There had been bad blood between them there, as the latter had once admitted. The prisoner had preempted the claim on Smoky Mountain in an abortive "boom" which Moreau had engineered, and over whose proceeds the pair, it was believed, had fallen out. He had then, to use the attorney's phrase, "swapped the devil for the witch," and had taken up with Prendergast, who by the manner of his taking off had finally justified a jail record in another state. Soon after this break Hugh Stires had vanished. On the day following his last appearance in the town, the body of Moreau had been found on the Little Paymaster Claim, shot by a cowardly bullet through the back--a fact which precluded the possibility that the deed had been done in self-defense.

There was evidence that he had died a painful and lingering death.

Suspicion had naturally pointed to the vanished man, and this suspicion had grown until, after some months' absence, he had returned, alleging that he had lost his memory of the past, to resume his life in the cabin on the mountain and his partnership with the thief Prendergast. The two had finally quarrelled and Prendergast had taken up his abode in the town. Subsequent to this, the latter had been heard to make dark insinuations, unnoted at the time but since grown significant, hinting at criminal knowledge of the prisoner. The close of this chapter had been Prendergast's dismal end in the gulch, when he had produced the sc.r.a.p of paper which was the crux of the case. He declared he had found Moreau dying; that the latter had traced with his own hand the accusation which fastened the crime upon Hugh Stires. Specimens of Moreau's handwriting were not lacking and seemed to prove beyond question its authenticity.

Such were the links of the coil which wound, with each witness, closer and closer--none knew better how closely than Harry Sanderson himself.

As witness succeeded witness, his heart sank. Jessica's burden was not to be lightened; Hugh must remain a Cain, a dweller in the dark places of the earth. In the larger part, his own sacrifice was to fail!

In his cross-examination Felder had fought gamely to lighten the weight of the evidence: The prisoner's old a.s.sociations with Moreau had been amicable, else they would not have come to Smoky Mountain together; if he had been disliked and avoided, the circ.u.mstance was referable rather to his companionships than to his own actions; whatever the pervasive contempt, there had been nothing criminal on the books against him. The lawyer's questions touched the baleful whisper that had become allegation and indictment, a prejudged conviction of guilt. They made it clear that the current belief had been the fruit of antipathy and bias; that it had been no question of evidence; so far as that went, he, Felder, might have done the deed, or Prendergast, or any one there. But Smoky Mountain would have said, as it did say, "It was Hugh Stires!" He compelled the jury to recognize that but one bit of actual evidence had been offered--there had been no eye-witness, no telltale incident. All rested upon a single sc.r.a.p of paper, a fragment of handwriting in no way difficult of imitation, and this in turn upon the allegation of a thief, struck down in an act of crime, whose word in an ordinary case of fact would not be worth a farthing. No motive had been alleged for the killing of Moreau by the prisoner, but Prendergast had had motive enough in his accusation. It had been open knowledge that he hated Hugh Stires, and his own character made it evident that he would not have scrupled to fasten a murder upon him.

But as Felder studied the twelve grave faces in the jury-box, who in the last a.n.a.lysis were all that counted, he shared his client's hopelessness. Judgment and experience told him how futile were all theories in the face of that inarticulate but d.a.m.ning witness that Prendergast had left behind him. So the afternoon dragged through, a day for the State.

Sunset came early at that season. Dark fell and the electric bulbs made their mimic day, but no one left the room. The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion. The jurymen no longer gazed at the prisoner, and when they looked at one another, it was with grim understanding. As the last witness for the State stepped down and the prosecutor rested, the judge glanced at the clock.

"There is a bare half-hour," he said tentatively. "Perhaps the defense would prefer not to open testimony till to-morrow."

Felder had risen. He saw his opportunity--to bring out sharply a contrasting point in the prisoner's favor, the one circ.u.mstance, considered apart, pointing toward innocence rather than guilt--to leave this for the jury to take with them, to off-set by its effect the weight of the evidence that had been given.

"I will proceed, if your Honor pleases," he said, and amid a rustle of surprise and interest called Jessica to the stand.

As she went forward to the witness chair, she put back the shielding veil, and her face, pale as bramble-bloom under her red-bronze hair, made an appealing picture. A cl.u.s.ter of white carnations was pinned to her coat and as she pa.s.sed Harry she bent and laid one in his hand. The slight act, not lost upon the spectators, called forth a sibilant flutter of sympathy. For it wore no touch of designed effect; its impulse was as pure and unmistakable as its meaning.

Harry had started uncontrollably as she rose, for he had had no inkling of the lawyer's intention, and a flush darkened his cheek at the cool touch of the flower. But this faded to a settled pallor, as under Felder's grave questioning she told in a voice as clear as a child's, yet with a woman's emotion struggling through it, the story of her disregarded warning. While she spoke pain and shame travelled through his every vein, for--though technically she had not brought herself into the perplexing purview of the law--she was laying bare the secret of her own heart, which now he would have covered at any cost.

"That is all, your Honor," said Felder, when Jessica had finished her story.

"Do you wish to cross-examine?" asked the judge perfunctorily.

The prosecutor looked at her an instant. He saw the faintness in her eyes, the twitching of the gloved hand on the rail. "By no means," he said courteously, and turned to his papers.

At the same moment, as Jessica stepped into the open aisle, the ironic chance which so often relieves the strain of the tragic by a breath of the ba.n.a.l, treated the spellbound audience to a novel sensation. Every electric light suddenly went out, and darkness swooped upon the town and the court-room. A second's carelessness at the power-house a half-mile away--the dropping of a bit of waste into a cog-wheel--and the larger mechanism that governed the issues of life and death was thrown into instant confusion. Hubbub arose--people stood up in their places.

The judge's gavel pounded viciously and his stentorian voice bellowed for order.

"Keep your seats, everybody!" he commanded. "Mr. Clerk, get some candles. This court is not yet adjourned!"

To Jessica the sudden blankness came with a nervous shock. Since that first meeting in the jail she had pinned her faith on the rea.s.surance that had been given her. She had fought down doubt and questioning and leaned hard upon her trust. But in her overwrought condition, as the end drew near with no solution of the enigma, this faith sometimes faltered.

The mystery was so impenetrable, the peril so imminent! To-day, in the court-room, her subtle sense had told her that, belief and conviction aside, a p.r.o.nounced feeling of sympathy existed for the man she loved.

She had not needed Mrs. Halloran's comforting a.s.surances on this score, for the atmosphere was surcharged with it. She had felt it when she laid the carnation in his hand, and even more unmistakably while she had given her testimony. She had realized the value of that one unvarnished fact, introduced so effectively--that he had had time to get away, and instead had chosen to surrender himself.