The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
Читать онлайн книгу.
a large crowd followed and surrounded them, until they reached the doors of the hotel. "Don't let Lawyer Louden bamboozle you!" "Hang him!" "Tar and feathers fer ye ef ye don't hang him!" These were the mildest threats, and Joe Louden, watching from an upper window of the Court-house, observed with a troubled eye how certain of the jury shrank from the pressure of the throng, how the cheeks of others showed sudden pallor. Sometimes "public sentiment" has done evil things to those who have not shared it; and Joe knew how rare a thing is a jury which dares to stand square against a town like Canaan aroused.
The end of that afternoon's session saw another point marked for the defence; Joe had put the defendant on the stand, and the little man had proved an excellent witness. During his life he had been many things--many things disreputable; high standards were not brightly illumined for him in the beginning of the night-march which his life had been. He had been a tramp, afterward a petty gambler; but his great motive had finally come to be the intention to do what Joe told him to do: that, and to keep Claudine as straight as he could. In a measure, these were the two things that had brought him to the pass in which he now stood, his loyalty to Joe and his resentment of whatever tampered with Claudine's straightness. He was submissive to the consequences: he was still loyal. And now Joe asked him to tell "just what happened," and Happy obeyed with crystal clearness. Throughout the long, tricky cross-examination he continued to tell "just what happened" with a plaintive truthfulness not to be imitated, and throughout it Joe guarded him from pitfalls (for lawyers in their search after truth are compelled by the exigencies of their profession to make pitfalls even for the honest), and gave him, by various devices, time to remember, though not to think, and made the words "come right" in his mouth. So that before the sitting was over, a disquieting rumor ran through the waiting crowd in the corridors, across the Square, and over the town, that the case was surely going "Louden's way." This was also the opinion of a looker-on in Canaan--a ferret-faced counsellor of corporations who, called to consultation with the eminent Buckalew (nephew of the Squire), had afterward spent an hour in his company at the trial. "It's going that young fellow Louden's way," said the stranger. "You say he's a shyster, but--"
"Well," admitted Buckalew, with some reluctance, "I don't mean that exactly. I've got an old uncle who seems lately to think he's a great man."
"I'll take your uncle's word for it," returned the other, smiling. "I think he'll go pretty far."
They had come to the flight of steps which descended to the yard,--and the visitor, looking down upon the angry crowd, added, "If they don't kill him!"
Joe himself was anxious concerning no such matter. He shook hands with Happy at the end of the sitting, bidding him be of good cheer, and, when the little man had marched away, under a strong guard, began to gather and sort his papers at a desk inside the bar. This took him perhaps five minutes, and when he had finished there were only three people left in the room: a clerk, a negro janitor with a broom, and the darky friend who always hopefully accompanies a colored man holding high public office. These two approvingly greeted the young lawyer, the janitor handing him a note from Norbert Flitcroft, and the friend mechanically "borrowing" a quarter from him as he opened the envelope.
"I'll be roun' yo' way to git a box o' SE-gahs," laughed the friend, "soon ez de campaign open up good. Dey all goin' vote yo' way, down on the levee bank, but dey sho' expecks to git to smoke a little 'fo' leckshun-day! We knows who's OW frien'!"
Norbert's missive was lengthy and absorbing; Joe went on his way, perusing it with profound attention; but as he descended the stairway to the floor below, a loud burst of angry shouting, outside the building, caused him to hasten toward the big front doors which faced Main Street. The doors opened upon an imposing vestibule, from which a handsome flight of stone steps, protected by a marble balustrade, led to the ground.
Standing at the top of these steps and leaning over the balustrade, he had a clear view of half the yard. No one was near him; everybody was running in the opposite direction, toward that corner of the yard occupied by the jail, the crowd centring upon an agitated whirlpool of men which moved slowly toward a door in the high wall that enclosed the building; and Joe saw that Happy Fear's guards, conducting the prisoner back to his cell, were being jostled and rushed. The distance they had made was short, but as they reached the door the pressure upon them increased dangerously. Clubs rose in the air, hats flew, the whirlpool heaved tumultuously, and the steel door clanged.
Happy Fear was safe inside, but the jostlers were outside--baffled, ugly, and stirred with the passion that changes a crowd into a mob.
Then some of them caught sight of Joe as he stood alone at the top of the steps, and a great shout of rage and exultation arose.
For a moment or two he did not see his danger. At the clang of the door, his eyes, caught by the gleam of a wide white hat, had turned toward the street, and he was somewhat fixedly watching Mr. Ladew extricate Ariel (and her aged and indignant escorts) from an overflow of the crowd in which they had been caught. But a voice warned him: the wild piping of a newsboy who had climbed into a tree near by.
"JOE LOUDEN!" he screamed. "LOOK OUT!"
With a muffled roar the crowd surged back from the jail and turned toward the steps. "Tar and feather him!" "Take him over to the river and throw him in!" "Drown him!" "Hang him!"
Then a thing happened which was dramatic enough in its inception, but almost ludicrous in its effect. Joe walked quietly down the steps and toward the advancing mob with his head cocked to one side, one eyebrow lifted, and one corner of his mouth drawn down in a faintly distorted smile.
He went straight toward the yelling forerunners, with only a small bundle of papers in his hands, and then--while the non-partisan spectators held their breath, expecting the shock of contact--straight on through them.
A number of the bulge-cheeked formed the scattering van of these forerunners, charging with hoarse and cruel shrieks of triumph. The first, apparently about to tear Joseph Louden to pieces, changed countenance at arm's-length, swerved violently, and with the loud cry, "HEAD HIM OFF!" dashed on up the stone steps. The man next behind him followed his lead, with the same shout, strategy, and haste; then the others of this advance attack, finding themselves confronting the quiet man, who kept his even pace and showed no intention of turning aside for them, turned suddenly aside for HIM, and, taking the cue from the first, pursued their way, bellowing: "HEAD HIM OFF! HEAD HIM OFF!" until there were a dozen and more rowdyish men and youths upon the steps, their eyes blazing with fury, menacing Louden's back with frightful gestures across the marble balustrade, as they hysterically bleated the chorus, "HEAD HIM OFF!"
Whether or not Joe could have walked through the entire mob as he had walked through these is a matter for speculation; it was believed in Canaan that he could. Already a gust of mirth began to sweep over the sterner spirits as they paused to marvel no less at the disconcerting advance of the lawyer than at the spectacle presented by the intrepid dare-devils upon the steps; a kind of lane actually opening before the young man as he walked steadily on. And when Mr. Sheehan, leading half a dozen huge men from the Farbach brewery, unceremoniously shouldered a way through the mob to Joe's side, reaching him where the press was thickest, it is a question if the services of his detachment were needed.
The laughter increased. It became voluminous. Homeric salvos shook the air. And never one of the fire-eaters upon the steps lived long enough to live down the hateful cry of that day, "HEAD HIM OFF!" which was to become a catch-word on the streets, a taunt more stinging than any devised by deliberate invention, an insult bitterer than the ancestral doubt, a fighting-word, and the great historical joke of Canaan, never omitted in after-days when the tale was told how Joe Louden took that short walk across the Court-house yard which made him Mayor of Canaan.
XXIV
MARTIN PIKE KEEPS AN ENGAGEMENT
An hour later, Martin Pike, looking forth from the Mansion, saw a man open the gate, and, passing between the unemotional deer, rapidly approach the house. He was a thin young fellow, very well dressed in dark gray, his hair prematurely somewhat silvered, his face prematurely somewhat lined, and his hat covered