“He shot him.” The District Attorney stepped aside. At once the girl’s gaze went to the back of the room and became fixed there. The District Attorney returned, stepped into her line of vision. She moved her head; he caught her gaze and held it and lifted the stained corn-cob before her eyes. The room sighed, a long hissing breath.
“Did you ever see this before?”
“Yes.”
The District Attorney turned away. “Your Honor and gentlemen, you have listened to this horrible, this unbelievable, story which this young girl has told; you have seen the evidence and heard the doctor’s testimony: I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to the agony of—” he ceased; the heads turned as one and watched a man come stalking up the aisle toward the Bench. He walked steadily, paced and followed by a slow gaping of the small white faces, a slow hissing of collars.
He had neat white hair and a clipped moustache like a bar of hammered silver against his dark skin. His eyes were pouched a little. A small paunch was buttoned snugly into his immaculate linen suit. He carried a panama hat in one hand and a slender black stick in the other. He walked steadily up the aisle in a slow expulsion of silence like a prolonged sigh, looking to neither side. He passed the witness stand without a glance at the witness, who still gazed at something in the back of the room, walking right through her line of vision like a runner crossing a tape, and stopped before the bar above which the Court had half-risen, his arms on the desk.
“Your Honor,” the old man said, “is the Court done with this witness?”
“Yes, sir, Judge,” the Court said; “yes, sir. Defendant, do you waive—”
The old man turned slowly, erect above the held breaths, the little white faces, and looked down at the six people at the counsel table. Behind him the witness had not moved. She sat in her attitude of childish immobility, gazing like a drugged person above the faces, toward the rear of the room. The old man turned to her and extended his hand. She did not move. The room expelled its breath, sucked it quickly in and held it again. The old man touched her arm.
She turned her head toward him, her eyes blank and all pupil above the three savage spots of rouge. She put her hand in his and rose, the platinum bag slipping from her lap to the floor with a thin clash, gazing again at the back of the room. With the toe of his small gleaming shoe the old man flipped the bag into the corner where the jurybox joined the Bench, where a spittoon sat, and steadied the girl down from the dais. The room breathed again as they moved on down the aisle.
Half way down the aisle the girl stopped again, slender in her smart open coat, her blank face rigid, then she moved on, her hand in the old man’s. They returned down the aisle, the old man erect beside her, looking to neither side, paced by that slow whisper of collars. Again the girl stopped. She began to cringe back, her body arching slowly, her arm tautening in the old man’s grasp. He bent toward her, speaking; she moved again, in that shrinking and rapt abasement.
Four younger men were standing stiffly erect near the exit. They stood like soldiers, staring straight ahead until the old man and the girl reached them. Then they moved and surrounded the other two, and in a close body, the girl hidden among them, they moved toward the door. Here they stopped again; the girl could be seen shrunk against the wall just inside the door, her body arched again. She appeared to be clinging there, then the five bodies hid her again and again in a close body the group passed through the door and disappeared.
The room breathed: a buzzing sound like a wind getting up. It moved forward with a slow increasing rush, on above the long table where the prisoner and the woman with the child and Horace and the District Attorney and the Memphis lawyer sat, and across the jury and against the Bench in a long sigh. The Memphis lawyer was sitting on his spine, gazing dreamily out the window. The child made a fretful sound, whimpering.
“Hush,” the woman said. “Shhhhhhhh.”
XXIX
The jury was out eight minutes. When Horace left the courthouse it was getting toward dusk. The tethered wagons were taking out, some of them to face twelve and sixteen miles of country road. Narcissa was waiting for him in the car. He emerged among the overalls, slowly; he got into the car stiffly, like an old man, with a drawn face. “Do you want to go home?” Narcissa said.
“Yes,” Horace said.
“I mean, to the house, or out home?”
“Yes,” Horace said.
She was driving the car. The engine was running. She looked at him, in a new dark dress with a severe white collar, a dark hat.
“Which one?”
“Home,” he said. “I dont care. Just home.”
They passed the jail. Standing along the fence were the loafers, the countrymen, the blackguard boys and youths who had followed Goodwin and the deputy from the courthouse. Beside the gate the woman stood, in the gray hat with the veil, carrying the child in her arms. “Standing where he can see it through the window,” Horace said. “I smell ham, too. Maybe he’ll be eating ham before we get home.” Then he began to cry, sitting in the car beside his sister.
She drove steadily, not fast. Soon they had left the town and the stout rows of young cotton swung at either hand in parallel and diminishing retrograde. There was still a little snow of locust blooms on the mounting drive. “It does last,” Horace said. “Spring does. You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”
He stayed to supper. He ate a lot. “I’ll go and see about your room,” his sister said, quite gently.
“All right,” Horace said. “It’s nice of you.” She went out. Miss Jenny’s wheel chair sat on a platform slotted for the wheels. “It’s nice of her,” Horace said. “I think I’ll go outside and smoke my pipe.”
“Since when have you quit smoking it in here?” Miss Jenny said.
“Yes,” Horace said. “It was nice of her.” He walked across the porch. “I intended to stop here,” Horace said. He watched himself cross the porch and then tread the diffident snow of the last locusts; he turned out of the iron gates, onto the gravel. After about a mile a car slowed and offered him a ride. “I’m just walking before supper,” he said; “I’ll turn back soon.” After another mile he could see the lights of town. It was a faint glare, low and close.
It got stronger as he approached. Before he reached town he began to hear the sound, the voices. Then he saw the people, a shifting mass filling the street, and the bleak, shallow yard above which the square and slotted bulk of the jail loomed. In the yard, beneath the barred window, a man in his shirt sleeves faced the crowd, hoarse, gesticulant. The barred window was empty.
Horace went on toward the square. The sheriff was among the drummers before the hotel, standing along the curb. He was a fat man, with a broad, dull face which belied the expression of concern about his eyes. “They wont do anything,” he said. “There is too much talk. Noise. And too early. When a mob means business, it dont take that much time and talk. And it dont go about its business where every man can see it.”
The crowd stayed in the street until late. It was quite orderly, though. It was as though most of them had come to see, to look at the jail and the barred window, or to listen to the man in shirt sleeves. After a while he talked himself out. Then they began to move away, back to the square and some of them homeward, until there was left only a small group beneath the arc light at the entrance to the square, among whom were two temporary deputies, and the night marshal in a broad pale hat, a flash light, a time clock and a pistol. “Git on home now,” he said. “Show’s over. You boys done had your fun. Git on home to bed, now.”
The drummers sat a little while longer along the curb before the hotel, Horace among them; the south-bound train ran at one oclock. “They’re going to let him get away with it, are they?” a drummer said. “With that corn-cob? What kind of folks have you got here? What does it take to make you folks mad?”
“He wouldn’t a never got a trial, in my town,” a second said.
“To jail, even,” a third said. “Who was she?”
“College girl. Good looker. Didn’t you see her?”
“I saw her. She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn’t have used no cob.”
Then the square was quiet. The clock struck eleven; the drummers went in and the Negro porter came and turned the chairs back into the wall. “You waiting for the train?” he said to Horace.
“Yes. Have you got a report on it yet?”
“It’s on time. But that’s two hours yet. You could lay down in the Sample Room, if you want.”
“Can I?” Horace said.
“I’ll show you,” the Negro said. The Sample Room was where the drummers showed their wares. It contained a sofa. Horace turned off the light
