"Merely this. That Miss West has discovered that I am behind this affair."
"What!" Doctor Sherman fell back a step, and his face filled with sudden terror. "Then--she knows everything?"
"She knows little, but she suspects much. For instance, since she knows that this is a plot, she is likely to suspect that every person in any way connected with the affair is guilty of conspiracy."
"Even--even me?"
"Even you."
"Then--you think?"
Blake turned his face sharply about upon Doctor Sherman--the first time since the beginning of their colloquy. It was his father's face--his father in one of his most relentless, overriding moods--the face of a man whom nothing can stop.
"I think," said he slowly, driving each word home, "that the only chance for people who want to come out of this affair with a clean name is to stick the thing right through as we planned."
Doctor Sherman did not speak.
"I tell you about Miss West for two reasons. First, in order to let you know the danger you're in. Second, in order, in case you decided to testify, that you may be forewarned and be prepared to outface her.
I believe you understand everything now?"
"Yes," was the almost breathless response.
"Then may I be allowed to ask what you are going to do--testify, or not testify?"
The minister's hands opened and closed. He swallowed with difficulty.
"Testify, or not testify?" Blake insisted.
"Testify," whispered Doctor Sherman.
"Just as you choose," said Blake coldly.
The minister sank back to his seat upon the mossy log, and bowed his head into his hands. "Oh, my God!" he breathed.
There followed a silence, during which Blake gazed upon the huddled figure. Then he turned his set face down the glittering, dwindled stream, and, one shoulder lightly against the sycamore, he watched the sun there at the river's end sink softly down into its golden slumber.
CHAPTER XI
THE TRIAL
Katherine's first thought, on leaving Bruce's office, was to lay her discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they could quickly discover wherein he had been duped--for she still held him to be an unwitting tool--and thus quickly clear up the whole case.
But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him out of her reach until the trial was over.
In sharpest disappointment, Katherine went home. With the trial so few hours away, with all her new discoveries buzzing chaotically in her head, she felt the need of advising with some one about the situation.
Bruce's offer of assistance recurred to her, and she found herself analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his rightness--courageous, unselfish, sincere--that was the way she now saw the editor of the _Express_.
But he had sneered at her, sharply criticized her, and she hotly spurned the thought of asking his aid. Instead of him, she that evening summoned Old Hosie Hollingsworth to her house, and to the old lawyer she told everything. Old Hosie was convinced that she was right, and was astounded.
"And to think that the good folks of this town used to denounce me as a worshipper of strange gods!" he ejaculated. "Gee, what'll they say when they learn that the idol they've been wearing out their knee-caps on has got clay feet that run clear up to his Adam's-apple!"
They decided that it would be a mistake for Katherine to try to use her new theories and discoveries openly in defence of her father. She had too little evidence, and any unsupported charges hurled against Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her to work up further evidence.
"Only," warned Hosie, "you must remember that the chances are that Blake has already slipped the proper word to Judge Kellog, and there'll be no postponement."
"Then I'll have to depend upon tangling up that Mr. Marcy on the stand."
"And Doctor Sherman?"
"There'll be no chance of entangling him. He'll tell a straightforward story. How could he tell any other? Don't you see how he's been used?--been made spectator to a skilfully laid scheme which he honestly believes to be a genuine case of bribery?"
At parting Old Hosie held her hand a moment.
"D'you remember the prophecy I made the day you took your office--that you would raise the dickens in this old town?"
"Yes," said Katherine.
"Well, that's coming true--as sure as plug hats don't grow on fig trees! Only not in the way I meant then. Not as a freak. But as a lawyer."
"Thank you." She smiled and slowly shook her head. "But I'm afraid it won't come true to-morrow."
"Of course a prophecy is no good, unless you do your best."
"Oh, I'm going to do my best," she assured him.
The next morning, on the long awaited day, Katherine set out for the Court House, throbbing alternately with hope and fear of the outcome.
Mixed with these was a perturbation of a very different sort--an ever-growing stage-fright. For this last there was good reason. Trials were a form of recreation as popular in Calloway County as gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and this trial--in the lack of a sensational murder in the county during the year--was the greatest of the twelvemonth. Moreover, it was given added interest by the fact that, for the first time in recorded history, Calloway County was going to see in action that weirdest product of whirling change, a woman lawyer.
Hub to hub about the hitch-racks of the Square were jammed buggies, surries, spring wagons and other country equipages. The court-room was packed an hour before the trial, and in the corridor were craning, straining, elbowing folk who had come too late. In the open windows--the court-room was on the ground floor--were the busts of eager citizens whose feet were pedestaled on boxes, the sale of which had been a harvest of small coin to neighbouring grocers; and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument--once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench--attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called the court to order, not with his usual masterpiece of mumbled unintelligibility, brought to perfection by long years of practice, but with real words that could have been understood had only the audience been listening.
But their attention was all fixed upon the counsel for the defence.
Katherine, in a plain white shirt waist and a black sailor, sat at a table alone with her father. Doctor West was painfully nervous; his long fingers were constantly twisting among themselves. Katherine was under an even greater strain. She realized with an intenser keenness now that the moment for action was at hand, that this was her first case, that her father's reputation, his happiness, perhaps even his life, were at stake; and she was well aware that all this theatre of people, whose eyes she felt burning into her back, regarded her as the final curiosity of nature. Behind her, with young Harper at his side, she had caught a glimpse of Arnold Bruce, eying her critically and sceptically she thought; and in the audience she had glimpsed the fixed, inscrutable face of Harrison Blake.
But she clung blindly to her determination, and as Bud White sat down, she forced herself to rise. A deep hush spread through the court-room.
She stood trembling, swallowing, voiceless, a statue of stage-fright, wildly hating herself for her impotence. For a dizzy, agonizing moment she saw herself a miserable failure--saw the crowd laughing at her as they filed out.
A youthful voice, from a balcony seat in an elm tree, floated in through the open window:
"Speak your piece, little girl, or set down."
There was a titter. She stiffened.
"Your--your Honour," she stammered, "I move a postponement in order to allow the defence more time to prepare its case."
Judge Kellog fingered his patriarchal beard. Katherine stood hardly breathing while she waited his momentous words. But his answer was as Old Hosie had predicted.