532
The Green Bag
for a yellow journal, sit about a long table, mentally arranging pictures of the climax. Waiting-just waiting for the— Inside the bar, his arm resting on a round table, sits a fair-haired boy of twenty or thereabouts, his weak blue eyes shifting about
from face to face, as if afraid to linger long anywhere. Right close to him sits a woman in black with a handsome but anxious face. She might pass for middle age, but for her gray hair. It was dark six months back. People glanced indifierently at the boy, but when they looked at her, their faces softened. She was undergoing one of the crosses of motherhood. Through it all she had been brave, encouraging by a pressure of the soft hand, or a reassuring look from the kind, gray eyes. Yesterday and the day before, and the day before that, and other days, she had worn an attractive white waist, but today she was attired in solemn black, as if she were going to a funeral. The gray-haired woman and the boy with the shifting blue eyes were also waiting. But what a desolate wait is theirs! The laughter comes to them from across the room, and though they know they are not the subjects of it, it pierces to the quick. Did these men not know that on the day when souls are arraigned to give an account for deeds done in the flesh there is no laughter? The door to the corridor is opened fre quently by lawyers and others passing in and out. Every time it groans upon its oilless hinges a chill sweeps over these two who watch and wait, for they know that by and by a signal will come, another door will creak, and twelve solemn men will enter, stepping softly one after the other, like at a funeral. They remember the looks of these men as they went out to that room, and recall, with an icy sensation around the heart, that every one of them averted his face as he silently filed by the accused and his mother. They try to borrow some hope from the ringing speech of the lawyer who spoke last for the defense. He was an old man with a. halo of silver-white hair crowning his broad forehead, and he had deep blue eyes that sparkled and flashed as he told the jury the boy prisoner was no murderer, and should not be hanged. And then they remembered with what fine courage he had shaken his clenched fist at the cruel men on the state's side and challenged them to reconcile their
evidence with any hypothesis of guilt. Not only that, he took the state's witnesses one by one, tore their testimony into shreds and stamped it under his righteously indig nant feet. It was finely done, and the dear old mother just ached to throw her arms around the good man and tell him of her grateful heart. But then, following the sequence, she recalled that a big fat man, with a red head and still redder mustache, got up and turned upside down everything the white-haired gentleman had said, and actually tried to make the jury believe that it would be doing a lawful and highly praiseworthy act to tear from her arms that boy of hers—that boy she adored as she did her God—and string him up to some black, ugly-looking gallows tree like a common felon! How could he talk so in the presence of a mother? She wondered how his mother would feel had he been in the place of her boy, and she longed to tell him. And as he went along in his merciless,
incisive way she remembered how the jurymen had straightened up and showed more interest than when the old man talked. She sought to catch their eyes, and to plead in her way with them, but as the red-headed man went on the jurymen seemed to resolutely avoid her. A knock on the door! Now, they are com ing! Your hand! Be strong, my boy-God and mother are herel With solemn tramp the twelve filed by and took their seats in the box, just to one side of the judge's stand. The judge, being summoned from his private room, entered and took his place at the desk. Then he rapped for order. From the corridors the crowd poured eagerly in. The reporters at the long table picked up their pencils and were alert for every move. Sheriff and bailiffs stood about importantly. In the tense silence the judge's voice sounded sharp and clear:— "Have you a verdict, Mr. Foreman?" HWe have." "Pass it up." "Courage, sonl He will guard the right! Listen!" "We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty!" "Thank God! My child is saved! My child is saved!" Macon, Mo.
