"Any partic'lar business here?" asked old Hen.
"Ah, yes!" said Smythe. "In addition to the pleasure of seeing you and your accomplished family, I desired a conference as to the curious way in which that little note--"
"Well, now that you've seen my accomplished family as much as I want you to," growled Hen, "you can git. I told you all I'm goin' to about what you call my note."
"But," said Fillmore, sort of like he was currying a kicking mule, "if you'd consent to look at it, I'm sure it would all return to your mind!"
Hen fired him off the place, though, and he sued Hen. The old man was affected a good deal like the collie pup, and mulled it over, and got sour on the world, especially lawyers that blackmailed and forged. He said he knew well enough that Smythe either did it or knew who did, and that every lawyer ought to be hung. I argued for imprisonment for the first offense for a no-account lawyer like Smythe, with a life sentence if it was proved that he knew any law, and the death penalty for good lawyers like Judge McKenzie; and Hen was so mad at me for what I said that he wouldn't let me have the top buggy the next Sunday night when I needed it the worst way.
The big doings come off when the case came up to be tried. I quit hauling ensilage corn, and went with Fanny and the old folks up to the county seat to give testimony that Hen never signed that note. Fanny stayed with Phoebe Relyea; but the rest of us stopped at the Accidental Hotel, where most of the jurors and others tangled up in court stayed too.
The lawyer in the case ahead of us was a new-comer, and strung it out day after day to advertise himself, and yelled so you could hear him over in the band-stand, to show his ability. Hen, all the time, was getting more and more morbid, and forgot his temperance vows, and tried to talk about the case to everybody. About half the time it would be a juryman he would try to confide in, and this made trouble on account of their thinking he was trying to influence them. One night Hen was owly as sin, drinking with Walker Swayne from Pleasant Valley Township; and when he cried into his beer because Fillmore Smythe was trying to swindle him and blast his good name, Walker slapped him for approaching him on a case he might be called to sit on. I put Hen to bed at the Revere House, and told Mrs. Peters he'd been called home. She 'phoned out to have him count the young turkeys, and the Swede second man had no more sense than to say he had not been there, instead of placing him where they had no telephone, as an honest hired man with any sprawl would have done. You couldn't trust this Swede as far as you could throw a thesaurus by the tail. I am not saying that he was corrupt; but he was just thumb-hand-sided and lummoxy, and blurted, "Hae ain't bane hare"
into the transmitter with never a thought of the danger of telling the truth. Mrs. Peters didn't know what to be distressed about, and just because I'm paid the princely salary I get for saying nothing about such things, she jumped on me like a duck on a June-bug.
When Hen and I went to McKenzie's office the night before our case came up, the lawyer was worried. He asked us if we knew who was going to testify against us.
"No," snapped Hen; "an' I don't care. Nobody ever saw me sign that note, and it don't make any matter."
Then he went on to tell what great friends he and Judge Brockway used to be, when the judge used to shoot prairie-chickens in Hen's stubble, and Mrs. Peters cooked the chickens for the judge.
"Brockway thinks as much of me as a brother," said Hen. "He told me as much when he was running for judge. He won't see me stuck."
This didn't seem to impress Judge McKenzie much. He still looked worried, and said the other side had got every banker in town on their side as handwriting experts.
"I don't like the looks of things," said he.
Hen flew mad at the idea of his lawyer's hinting that any man could get stuck in such a case. The judge tried to explain, and Hen asked him how much the other side was paying him, and the judge threw up his job.
Pretty soon, though, Hen got him to take a new retainer of fifteen dollars, and he opened a new account in his books. This made Hen feel good, for the judge was great with juries when he was sober. He was good and sober now, for he had just taken the drinking cure for the third time. We had lots of faith in Providence and McKenzie, but were scary as three-year-olds that night at any strange noise in the brush.
You know how it is when you feel that way.
Things went wrong the next morning. So many of the jurors said that Hen had talked to them that Judge Brockway just glared at Hen, and said that the court was not favorably impressed by tactics of that sort.
Walker Swayne told how he had slapped Hen's chops to drive off his improper advances, and Judge Brockway said that he could not condone breaches of the peace; but a juror, like a woman, was justified if any one; and when old Hen asked Mac for the Lord's sake, were there any women sitting on this case, Brockway wilted Hen again with a look.
I asked Hen at recess if he thought Brockway would ask him as a friend and brother to sit up on the bench, and he flared up and said Brock was all right, but was disguising his feelings as a judge.
"He's got a disguise that's a bird," said I, and Hen said I might consider myself discharged; but wrote me a note after court took up, hiring me back.
The next juror up related another case of Hen's vile tactics, and the judge threatened to send him to jail if anything more bobbed up. Hen fell back into his chair limpsy, like dropping a wet string,--all spiral like,--and everybody looked at us in horror for our pollyfoxing with the jury. As a matter of fact, in his state of beer and overconfidingness, Hen would have wept on the breast of a wooden Indian that would have held still while he told of the octopus and its forgeries. In all the time I worked for him, he never tried once to destroy the jury system or his country's liberty.
Finally they found twelve men that didn't know anything about the case or anything, and had no opinions or prejudices for or against anything, and the lawyers told the jury what they expected to prove.
"The sacred system of trial by jury," said Fillmore Smythe, "has been saved from the attacks of the defendant by an incorruptible court.
Placed on trial before this intelligent jury, what the defendant may do I can not even guess; but we have here in court his note, signed in his own proper person."
"'T ain't so!" busted out Hen, in his own improper person. "You hain't got no such note!"
"One more interruption of this sort," said the judge, peeking down at Hen, "and the example that I'll make of _you_ won't soon be forgotten.
Proceed, Mr. Smythe!"
"Concealing his love!" whispers I to Hen; and he put the leg of his chair on my foot and ground it around till I almost yelled.
When they had marked the note "Exhibit A" the way they do, Smythe said "Plaintiff rests," though they didn't seem near as tired as our side was, and the court let out for noon. They let McKenzie take the note with him to look at. There it was on one of those blanks that it cost me a good claim in Kansas once to practise writing on, and I never got to be much of a penman either; it was signed "Henry Peters" as natural as life.
"Well," questioned Mac, as Hen turned it over, "what do you say to it, Henry?"
I could feel that all the time McKenzie had had a hunch that Hen had really signed the note, and Hen felt it, too, and he threw to the winds the remains of his last conversion, and his fear that Mac would strike again, and talked as bad as if he was learning a calf to drink.
"Why, you scoundrelly Keeley graduate," he yelled, "what did I tell you! That's a forgery, as any one but a half-witted pettifogger could see by lookin' at it!"
"I sever my connection with this case right now," said Mac, away down in his chest, and as dignified as a ring-master. "No inebriated litigant can refer to the struggle and expense I have incurred in lifting myself to a nobler plane of self-control, and then call for my skill and erudition in extricating him from the quagmire of the law in which his imprudences have immeshed him. Go, sir, to some practitioner so far lost to manhood as to be able to resist the temptation to brain you with his notary-public's seal. Leave me to my books!"
Mac went into the next room and shut the door, but did not lock it.
"I can see," said Colonel Baggs, "the wisdom of leaving it on the latch."
I took and apologized for Hen; but Mac stuck his nose in a book and waved me away. If Hen had been a little drunker he would have cried; and I went back to woo McKenzie some more. Finally, he agreed to come into the case again, on payment of another retainer fee of twenty dollars.
Hen was game, and skinned a double-X off his roll without a flinch. Mac opened up a new account in his books, and Hen, for my successful diplomacy, raised my wages two dollars a month. It was a great lesson to me.
Of course I could see that it was not Hen's signature; for his way of writing was Spencerian, modified by handling a fork, shucking corn, and by the ink drying up while he was thinking. The name on the note was kind of backhand. Mac asked about other Henry Peterses, and Hen told him that there was a man that passed by that name in the county a year or so back, but that he never had credit for three hundred cents, never bought any such machinery, and had escaped to Dakota.
When old Hen testified, he had one of his spluttery spells of reverse English caused by his language getting wound on the shafting, and his denying the signature didn't seem to make much impression on any one.
Smythe made him admit that he had bought the tools, and had no check-stub of the payment; and when he said he paid Bloxham in cash, Smythe laid back and grinned, and McKenzie moved that the grin be took down by the reporter, so he could move to strike it out.
Everybody just seemed to despise us but Mac; and I was as ashamed as a dog. This Bloxham, the machine agent, was dead, and most everybody there had been to his funeral; but it took half an hour to prove his demise.
Two jurors went to sleep on this, and one of them hollered "Whay! whay!"
in his sleep, like he was driving stock, and Brockway pounded and glared at _us_ for it. I wished I was back with Ole running the silage cutter.
All this time we kind of lost sight of Mrs. Peters and Fanny. Fanny sent some word over to the Accidental the second evening, and her mother went over to Relyea's, and came back kind of fluttery. I was sent to Fanny with a suit-case of dresses her mother had there, and Fanny was in the awfullest taking with blushing and her breath fluttering like a fanning-mill with palpitation of the heart that I couldn't think what was the matter with her. She had never blushed at seeing me before. I began to see what a pretty girl she was; but I couldn't think of tying myself down, even if she did. She came up close to me, shook hands with me, and bid me good-by when I came away. This was a sign she wanted to hold some one's hand or was going away; and I knew she wasn't expected to go away. It set me to thinking. Mac said he wouldn't want her testimony until the surrey-butter part, if then. I made up my mind I'd go up and talk with her once in a while, instead of sticking around down-town. But this trial absorbed my attention when the experts came on.
Smythe had had a magnification made of the name on the note, and the one on old Hen's letter, and every banker in town went on and swore about these names. John Smythe, Fillmore's half-brother, knew Hen's signature; and had had to study handwriting so hard in the bank that he had got to be an expert. He was always thought a kind of a ninny, but here's where he sure did loom up with the knowledge. He acted just as smart as those Chicago experts we read about, and living right here in the county all the time, and never out of the bank a day! A good deal of my ability comes from dropping into some big city like Fort Dodge or Ottumwa, or maybe Sioux City, or Des Moines every winter, and getting on to the new wrinkles and broadening out; but John Smythe was always behind that brass railing, like a cow in stanchions. And yet he was able to see that those two signatures just had to be made by the same man. This spiel was cutting ice with the jury, and Mac roared and pointed out where they were different; but Smythe hinted that it only seemed so because Mac was ignorant. He could just see the same man a-making them--the way the stem of the "P" was made, and the finish of the "y" like a pollywog's tail made it a cinch. Hen swore under his powerful breath that it was a dad-burned lie; but it looked awful plausible to me.
"You notice," said Fillmore, "that the name on the letter is more scrawly and uneven?"
"Yes," said John, "but that merely means that he used a different pen or was nervous. I think I see in the last the characteristic tremor of anger."
This looked bad to me, for if ever a man had a right to the characteristic tremor of anger, it was old Hen when he signed that letter. It showed Smythe knew what he was at.
Mac showed them a lot of Hen's real signatures, but the experts said they only made it clearer. Every one had a little curlicue or funny business that put Hen deeper in the hole; and he finally chucked the bunch, all the reporter didn't have, in the stove. Fillmore Smythe inflated himself and blew up at this; but Brockway, still concealing his love, said that while it looked bad, and the jury might consider this destruction of evidence as one of the facts, the papers belonged to defendant and the court didn't see fit to do anything. Our case looked as bad as it could, and I didn't see why Smythe hollered so about it.
The jury looked on us as horse-thieves and crooks, and every time old Hen stepped, he balled things up worse.
Whitten, of the First National, was stronger than John Smythe. He said it was physically impossible for any man but the one that signed the letter to have made that note; and he was an expert from away back. He pointed out the anger tremor, too. Mac showed him how the check-signatures all looked like that on the letter, and not like the one on the note; but Whitten said a man was always calm when he made a note, and mad as a hatter when he drew a check. Knowing Hen, this looked plausible to me, and made a hit with the jury. The man that hollered "Whay!" wrote it down on his cuff.
Ole Pete Hungerford, the note-shaver, snorted disdainfully that there was no doubt that the note was genuine. He swore that a bogus check I made was genuine, too; and got redder than a turkey when he found I had made it, and said it was the work of a skilful forger. The man that hollered "Whay!" looked at me in horror, and wrote some more on his cuff. I felt considerable cheap.
Every expert said the same thing. I believe that there was one while when Hen would have admitted he signed the note if they had called him and raw-hided him enough. Hen had some hopes when Zenas Whitcher of the Farmers' Bank had some doubts about one signature; but he flattened out again when he found it was the one on the letter that had old Zenas guessing, and that he was dead sure the one on the note was a sure-enough genuine sig, only it looked as if he was trying to disguise his hand. Fillmore seemed to think pretty well of this, and had them all go back and swear about this disguise business. They could all see wiggly spots now and places gone over twice where Hen had doubled on his trail to throw pursuers off the track and disguise his hand. It begun to look to me like Hen was up to some skulduggery,--all these smooth guys swearing like that,--but Hen was paying me my wages and needed friends, and I stuck. He looked down his nose like an egg-sucking pup. When I came on to swear that it was not Hen's signature on the note, my mind was so full of curlicues and polly-wogs' tails, and anger tremors, and disguises, and the gall of my swearing against these big men that had money to burn, that I went into buck fever, and was all shot to rags by Smythe's cross-examination,--any of you fellows would be,--so that I finally admitted that the note looked pretty good to me, and that I'd have probably taken it for Hen's note if I'd been a banker and had it offered to me. Mac threw up his hands, said that was all our evidence, then went at the jury hammer and tongs, and I looked at poor old Hen all collapsed down into his chair like a rubber snake, and I went and hid.
In the morning I crawled out, supposing that it would all be over, and wondering where I'd find Hen; but I heard Judge McKenzie's closing argument rolling out of the court-house windows like thunder. I didn't care for eloquence the way I was feeling, and was just sneaking away, when who should I run on to but Fanny walking with a fellow down under the maples. I was shocked, for she was hanging to his arm the way no nice girl ought to do unless it's dark. I trailed along behind to see who it was, when the fellow turned his head quick, and I saw it was Hank. They come up to me, Fanny still shamelessly hanging to his arm, looking excited and foolish, like they had just experienced religion or got engaged.