Joe moved his feet uneasily, clasped and unclasped his long fingers where they rested on the arm of his chair, and moistened his lips with his tongue. The struggle was coming now. They would rack him, and tear him, and break his heart.

"I don't know whether they'll believe it or not," said he at last.

"Where was Ollie Chase when Isom came into that room?" asked the prosecutor, lowering his voice as the men who tiptoed around old Isom when he lay dead on the kitchen floor had lowered theirs.

"You have heard her say that she was in her room upstairs," said Joe.

"But I am asking you this question," the prosecutor reminded him sharply. "Where was Ollie Chase?"

Joe did not meet his questioner's eyes when he answered. His head was bowed slightly, as if in thought.

"She was in her room, I suppose. She'd been in bed a long time, for it was nearly midnight then."

The prosecuting attorney pursued this line of questioning to a persistent and trying length. He wanted to know all about the relations of Joe and Ollie; where their respective rooms were, how they pa.s.sed to and from them, and the entire scheme of the household economy.

He asked Joe pointedly, and swung back to that question abruptly and with sharp challenge many times, whether he ever made love to Ollie; whether he ever held her hands, kissed her, talked with her when Isom was not by to hear what was said.

The people snuggled down and forgot the oncoming darkness, the gray forerunner of which already had invaded the room as they listened. This was what they wanted to hear; this was, in their opinion, getting down to the thing that the prosecutor should have taken up at the beginning and pushed to the guilty end. They had come there, day after day, and sat patiently waiting for that very thing. But the great sensation which they expected seemed a tedious thing in its development.

Joe calmly denied the prosecutor's imputations, and put them aside with an evenness of temper and dignity which lifted him to a place of high regard in the heart of every woman present, from grandmother to high-school miss. For even though a woman believes her sister guilty, she admires the man who knows when to hold his tongue.

For two hours and more Sam Lucas kept hammering away at the stern front of the defendant witness. He had expected to break him down, simple-minded country lad that he supposed him to be, in a quarter of that time, and draw from him the truth of the matter in every detail. It was becoming evident that Joe was feeling the strain. The tiresome repet.i.tion of the questions, the unvarying denial, the sudden sorties of the prosecutor in attempt to surprise him, and the constant labor of guarding against it--all this was heaping up into a terrific load.

Time and again Joe's eyes had gone to the magnet of Alice Price's face, and always he had seen her looking straight at him--steadily, understandingly, as if she read his purpose. He was satisfied that she knew him to be innocent of that crime, as well as any of the indiscretions with Ollie which the prosecutor had attempted to force him to admit. If he could have been satisfied with that a.s.surance alone, his hour would have been blessed. But he looked for more in every fleeting glance that his eyes could wing to her, and in the turmoil of his mind he was unable to find that which he sought.

Sam Lucas, seeing that the witness was nearing the point of mental and physical strain at which men go to pieces, and the vigil which they have held above their secrets becomes open to surprise, hung to him with his worriment of questions, scarcely granting him time to sigh.

Joe was pestered out of his calm and dignified att.i.tude. He twisted in his chair, where many a confounded and beset soul had writhed before him, and ran his fingers through his long hair, disturbing it into fantastic disorder. His breath came through his open lips, his shoulders sagged wearily, his long back was bent as he drooped forward, whipping his f.a.gged mind to alertness, guarding every word now, weighing every answer a deliberate while. Sweat drenched his face and dampened the thick wisps of hair. He scooped the welling moisture from his forehead with his crooked finger and flung it to the floor with a rustic trick of the fields.

Sam Lucas gave him no respite. Moment by moment he pressed the panting race harder, faster; moment by moment he grew more exacting, imperative and pressing in his demands for unhesitating replies. While he hara.s.sed and urged the sweating victim, the prosecutor's eyes narrowed, his thin lips pressed hard against his teeth. The moment was approaching for the final a.s.sault, for the fierce delivery of the last, invincible dart.

The people felt it coming, and panted with the acute pleasures of expectation; Hammer saw its hovering shadow, and rose to his feet; Mrs.

Newbolt suffered under the strain until she rocked from side to side, unconscious of all and everybody but herself and Joe, and groaned.

What were they going to do to Joe--what were they going to do?

Sam Lucas was hurling his questions into Joe's face, faster and faster.

His voice was shaded now with the inflection of accusation, now discredit; now it rose to the pitch of condemnation, now it sank to a hoa.r.s.e whisper of horror as he dwelt upon the scene in Isom Chase's kitchen, the body of old Isom stretched in its own blood upon the floor.

Joe seemed to stumble over his replies, to grope, to flounder. The agony of his soul was in his face. And then, in a moment of tortured desperation he rose from his seat, tall, gaunt, disordered, and clasped his hand to his forehead as if driven to the utmost bound of his endurance and to the outer brink of his resources.

The prosecutor paused with leveled finger, while Joe, remembering himself, pushed his hair back from his brow like one waking from a hot and troubled sleep, and resumed his seat. Then suddenly, in full volume of voice, the prosecutor flung at him the lance for which he had been weakening Joe's defenses through those long and torturing hours.

"Tell this jury what the 'words' were which you have testified pa.s.sed between you and Isom Chase after he made the threat to kill you, and before he ran for the gun!"

Hammer bellowed forth an objection, which was quietly overruled. It served its purpose in a way, even though it failed in its larger intent, for the prosecutor's headlong a.s.sault was checked by it, the force of his blow broken.

Joe sat up as if cold water had been dashed over him. Instead of crushing him entirely, and driving him to the last corner shrinking, beaten and spiritless, and no longer capable of resistance, it seemed to give him a new grip on himself, to set his courage and defiance again on the fighting line.

The prosecuting attorney resented Hammer's interference at the moment of his victory--as he believed it--and turned to him with an ugly scowl.

But Hammer was imperturbable. He saw the advantage that he had gained for Joe by his interposition, and that was more than he had expected.

Only a moment ago Hammer had believed everything lost.

Sam Lucas repeated the question. Joe drew himself up, cold and forbidding of front. He met the prosecutor eye to eye, challenge for challenge.

"I can't tell you that, sir," he replied.

"The time has come when you must tell it, your evasions and dodgings will not avail you any longer. What were those words between you and Isom Chase?"

"I'm sorry to have to refuse you--" began Joe.

"Answer--my--question!" ordered the prosecutor in loud voice, banging his hand upon the table to accent its terror.

In the excitement of the moment people rose from their seats, women dropping things which they had held in their laps, and clasping other loose articles of apparel to their skirts as they stood uncouthly, like startled fowls poising for flight.

Joe folded his arms across his chest and looked into the prosecutor's inflamed face. He seemed to erect between himself and his inquisitor in that simple movement an impenetrable shield, but he said nothing. Hammer was up, objecting, making the most of the opportunity. Captain Taylor rapped on the panel of the old oak door; the crouching figures in the crowd settled back to their seats with rustlings and sighs.

Sam Lucas turned to the judge, the whiteness of deeper anger sweeping the flush of excitement from his face. His voice trembled.

"I insist, your honor, that the witness answer my question!"

Hammer demanded that the court instruct his client regarding his const.i.tutional privileges. Mrs. Newbolt leaned forward and held out her hands in dumb pleading toward her son, imploring him to speak.

"If the matter which you are withholding," began the judge in formal speech, "would tend to incriminate you, then you are acting within your const.i.tutional rights in refusing to answer. If not, then you can be lodged in jail for contempt of court, and held there until you answer the question which the prosecuting attorney has asked you. Do you understand this?"

"Yes, sir; I understand," said Joe.

"Then," said the judge, "would it incriminate you to reply to the prosecuting attorney's question?"

A faint flush spread on Joe's face as he replied:

"No, Judge Maxwell, it wouldn't incriminate me, sir."

Free for the moment from his watchful sword-play of eyes with the prosecutor, Joe had sought Alice's face when he replied to the judge. He was still holding her eyes when the judge spoke again.

"Then you must answer the question, or stand in contempt of court," said he.

Joe rose slowly to his feet. The sheriff, perhaps thinking that he designed making a dash for liberty, or to throw himself out of a window, rushed forward in official zeal. The judge, studying Joe's face narrowly, waved the officer back. Joe lifted a hand to his forehead in thoughtful gesture and stroked back his hair, standing thus in studious pose a little while. A thousand eyes were bent upon him; five hundred palpitating brains were aching for the relief of his reply. Joe lifted his head and turned solemnly to the judge.

"I can't answer the prosecuting attorney's question, sir," he said. "I'm ready to be taken back to jail."

The jurors had been leaning out of their places to listen, the older ones with hands cupped to their ears. Now they settled back with disappointed faces, some of them shaking their heads in depreciation of such stubbornness.

"You are making a point of honor of it?" said the judge, sharply but not unkindly, looking over his gla.s.ses at the raw citadel of virtue which rose towerlike before him.

"If you will forgive me, sir, I have no more to say," said Joe, a flitting shadow, as of pain, pa.s.sing over his face.

"Sit down," said the judge.