The Bondboy Part 25

"Well, Isom was an unreasonable and quick-tempered man," Joe replied.

The coroner rose to his feet in a quick start, as if he intended to leap over the table. He pointed his finger at Joe, shaking his somber beard.

"What did Isom Chase catch you at when he came into that kitchen?" he asked accusingly.

"He saw me standing there, just about to blow out the light and go to bed," said Joe.

"What did you and Isom quarrel about last night?"

Joe did not reply at once. He seemed debating with himself over the advisability of answering at all. Then he raised his slow eyes to the coroner's face.

"That was between him and me," said he.

"Very well," said the coroner shortly, resuming his seat. "You may tell the jury how Isom Chase was shot."

Joe described Isom's leap for the gun, the struggle he had with him to restrain him, the catching of the lock in the fork as Isom tugged at the barrel, the shot, and Isom's death.

When he finished, the coroner bent over his note-book again, as if little interested and less impressed. Silence fell over the room. Then the coroner spoke, his head still bent over the book, not even turning his face toward the witness, his voice soft and low.

"You were alone with Isom in the kitchen when this happened?"

A flash of heat ran over Ollie's body. After it came a sweeping wave of cold. The room whirled; the world stood on edge. Her hour had struck; the last moment of her troubled security was speeding away. What would Joe answer to that?

"Yes," said Joe calmly, "we were alone."

Ollie breathed again; her heart's constriction relaxed.

The coroner wheeled on Joe.

"Where was Mrs. Chase?" he asked.

A little murmur, as of people drawing together with whispers; a little soft scuffing of cautiously shifted feet on the carpet, followed the question. Ollie shrank back, as if wincing from pain.

"Mrs. Chase was upstairs in her room," answered Joe.

The weight of a thousand centuries lifted from Ollie's body. Her vision cleared. Her breath came back in measured flow to her lips, moist and refreshing.

He had not told. He was standing between her and the sharp tongues of those waiting people, already licking hungrily in their awakened suspicion, ready to sear her fair name like flames. But there was no grat.i.tude in her heart that moment, no quick lifting of thankfulness nor understanding of the great peril which Joe had a.s.sumed for her. There was only relief, blessed, easing, cool relief. He had not told.

But the coroner was a persistent man. He was making more than an investigation out of it; he was fairly turning it into a trial, with Joe as the defendant. The people were ready to see that, and appreciate his attempts to uncover the dark motive that lay behind this deed, of which they were convinced, almost to a man, that Joe was guilty.

"Was Isom jealous of you?" asked the coroner, beginning the a.s.sault on Joe's reserve suddenly again when it seemed that he was through. For the first time during the inquiry Joe's voice was unsteady when he replied.

"He had no cause to be, and you've got no right to ask me that, either, sir!" he said.

"Shame on you, shame on you!" said Mrs. Newbolt, leaning toward the coroner, shaking her head reprovingly.

"I've got the right to ask you anything that I see fit and proper, young man," the coroner rebuked him sternly.

"Well, maybe you have," granted Joe, drawing himself straight in the chair.

"Did Isom Chase ever find you alone with his wife?" the coroner asked.

"Now you look here, sir, if you'll ask me questions that a gentleman ought to ask, I'll answer you like a gentleman, but I'll never answer such questions as that!"

There was a certain polite deference in Joe's voice, which he felt that he owed, perhaps, to the office that the man represented, but there was a firmness above it all that was unmistakable.

"You refuse to answer any more questions, then?" said the coroner slowly, and with a significance that was almost sinister.

"I'll answer any proper questions you care to ask me," answered Joe.

"Very well, then. You say that you and Isom quarreled last night?"

"Yes, sir; we had a little spat."

"A little spat," repeated the coroner, looking around the room as if to ask the people on whose votes he depended for reelection what _they_ thought of a "little spat" which ended in a man's death. There was a sort of broad humor about it which appealed to the blunt rural sense. A grin ran over their faces like a spreading wavelet on a pool. "Well now, what was the beginning of that 'little spat'?"

"Oh, what's that got to do with it?" asked Joe impatiently. "You asked me that before."

"And I'm asking you again. What was that quarrel over?"

"None of your business!" said Joe hotly, caring nothing for consequences.

"Then you refuse to answer, and persist in your refusal?"

"Well, we don't seem to get on very well," said Joe.

"No, we don't," the coroner agreed snappishly. "Stand down; that will be all."

The listening people shifted and relaxed, leaned and whispered, turning quick eyes upon Joe, studying him with furtive wonder, as if they had discovered in him some fearful and hideous thing, which he, moving among them all his life, had kept concealed until that day.

Ollie followed him in the witness-chair. She related her story, framed on the cue that she had taken from Greening's testimony and Joe's substantiation of it, in low, trembling voice, and with eyes downcast.

She knew nothing about the tragedy until Sol called up to her, she said, and then she was in ignorance of what had happened. Mrs. Greening had told her when she came that Isom was killed.

Ollie was asked about the book-agent boarder, as Greening had been asked. Morgan had left on the morning of the fateful day, she said, having finished his work in that part of the country. She and Joe were alone in the house that night.

The coroner spared her, no matter how far his sharp suspicions flashed into the obscurity of the relations between herself and the young bondman. The people, especially the women, approved his leniency with nods. Her testimony concluded the inquiry, and the coroner addressed the jury.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you will take into consideration the evidence you have heard, and determine, if possible, the manner in which Isom Chase came to his death, and fix the responsibility for the same. It is within your power to recommend that any person believed by you to be directly or indirectly responsible for his death, be held to the grand jury for further investigation. Gentlemen, you will now view the body."

Alive, Isom Chase had walked in the secret derision and contempt of his neighbors, despised for his parsimony, ridiculed for his manner of life.

Dead, he had become an object of awe which they approached softly and with fear.

Isom lay upon his own cellar door, taken down from its hinges to make him a couch. It stood over against the kitchen wall, a chair supporting it at either end, and Isom stretched upon it covered over with a sheet.

The coroner drew back the covering, revealing the face of the dead, and the jurymen, hats in hand, looked over each other's shoulders and then backed away.

For Isom was no handsomer as a corpse than he had been as a living, striving man. The hard, worn iron of his frame was there, like an old plowshare, useless now, no matter what furrows it had turned in its day.

The harsh speech was gone out of his crabbed lips, but the scowl which delinquent debtors feared stood frozen upon his brow. He had died with gold above his heart, as he had lived with the thought of that bright metal crowding every human sentiment out of it, and the mystery of those glittering pieces under his dead hand was unexplained.