McClure\'s Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 written by Various

V >> Various >> McClure\'s Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2

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[Illustration: THE SILENT WITNESS.]

THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more
from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion
and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and
trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle
from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He
carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted
farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and
asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he
know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the
empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners
of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife
plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in
a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes
contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of
anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to
be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the
hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law
to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand
old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and
grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety
homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what
was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship,
Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount
Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the
tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred
acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the
poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of
boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from
the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village
would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy
road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and
the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors
of the desolate spot.

"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his
mother.

"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she
answered with quaint devoutness.

But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a
late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and
August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of
the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company,"
and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two,
and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to
save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love
to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than
she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was
willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac
brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and
the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone
facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great
tears blinded his sight.

We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple
and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched
him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a
living--and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head.
But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart
bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's
blessing, an apprehension for the future--bitter, breathless, began
to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to
him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain,
had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a
meaning.

But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off
valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with
awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of
trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow
of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became
indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread
into the house.

"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to
Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces
before him.

"Lord a-mercy!"

"Ikey! Air you teched?"

"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss--he
went--see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he--"

"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That
was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on
the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.

"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm
going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan
Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the
fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an'
live with you, mother--won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother
you've got now. Your folks can spare you."

Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color
so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native
crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the
granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the
black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the
smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a
glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double
charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the
mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such
a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a
feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was
fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at
his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the
more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life,
the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity
himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the
two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked
on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and
the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for
his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him
unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.

"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and
beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height,
displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular
development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of
his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but
once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet
deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been
taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast
over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head,
and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much
ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed
door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark
mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son
seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks.
From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day--for how
could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about
the heifer?--Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.

August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her
procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months.
Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her
son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had
carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half
dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts
that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served
six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his
mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed
a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties
that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac
naively considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.

At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty
years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school
teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was
written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:

"_In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet
young, he began to seek after the God of David his father_.--
2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."

"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the
inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is
the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more
on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any
accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he
was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it,
neither."

Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and
to board him in the cheapest way for several days.

"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height,
"no one can!"

It is just such country lads as this--strong, self-reliant,
religious--who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite
mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other,
by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.

Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation
came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of
unuttered misery.

But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in
his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down
amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the
last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and
doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby
disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor
had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.

[Illustration: "MOVE ON, WILL YER!"]

"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his
silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy
upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly
reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance,
and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand
gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.

"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved
the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"

She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his
father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped
that they might clasp about his neck.

"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong.
Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an
honest man, an' a pious woman, and"--dropping with great solemnity
into scriptural language--"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your
godly name."

With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their
sons into the whirlwind of the world.

Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears
streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her,
and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But
his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.

"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good
boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man,
moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.

Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The
impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the
pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.

They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken,
helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the
parlor window. If he had known--a doubt crossed his brain, but the
girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they
ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting,
breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they
hid behind an oak tree and clasped.

* * * * *

It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted
terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it
until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters.
He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics
greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked
from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet
his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz
of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic
inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a
city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and
his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of
acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull"
or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of
the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he
had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be
swerved.

To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a
righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the
most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience--and
how else should he? This was his syllogism:

A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.

This man before me is a policeman.

Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to
him for advice.

The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise--and laughed
at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a
"billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy
has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.

It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a
mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the
guardian of the peace confidently.

This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had
emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity.
The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet
were in his air.

"Excuse me, sir--I want to ask you--" began Isaac, after a proper
obeisance.

"Move on, will yer!"

"But I wanted to ask you--"

"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"

"I want you to help me!"

"The ---- you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if
ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye
to the lock-up--so help me--!"

Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with
one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal
possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up
the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his
ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that
poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover
the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a
week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the
protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed
with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he
not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness
of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector
was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had
received half annihilated his intelligence.

[Illustration: "AM--I--IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR? IS
THIS YOUR LAW?"]

Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than
the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why
did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the
terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or
the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no
part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him.
It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid
rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than
barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror--not of cowardice, but of
friendlessness--seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might
possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on.
He had passed through the main street--or across it--he did not
know--until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks
had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms
had been exchanged for vulgar saloons--until--

Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud
cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man
dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms.
With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down
the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer.

By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the
building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac
caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the
pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding
a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the
situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports.
These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness
upon the heels of lightning.

Isaac's eyes were now strained upon the creature who was shot. He saw
the man stagger, throw up his hands, and fall. He heard a groan. At
that time the murderer with the smoking revolver was not more than ten
paces away. As he fired, he had stopped. When he saw his victim fall,
he gave a hoarse laugh.

By this time the lights in the saloon were put out, and its occupants
had fled. The rustle of human buzzards flocking to the tragedy had
begun. A motion that the murderer made to escape aroused the New
Hampshire boy to a fierce sense of justice. A few bounds brought him
by the side of the ruffian, who looked upon him with astonishment, and
then with inflamed fear. Isaac furiously struck the pointed pistol to
the pavement, and grasped the fellow's waist. Then he knew that he had
almost met his match. Isaac held his opponent's left arm by the wrist,
and tightened the vise. The murderer held the boy around his neck with
a contracting grip such as only a prize-fighter understands. Neither
spoke a word. It was power--power against skill.

There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that
the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called:
"Police! Police!"

The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then,
before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange
thing happen to his wrists.

* * * * *

The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are
different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt
stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades,
is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity
and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or
gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner,
with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means
to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between
rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a
sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know
better.

The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he
listened to the officer's story.

"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.

Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first
time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural
expression of trust returned to his face.

"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It
was dark--and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from
his cheeks. "Can I go now?"

Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would
have known that the young man before him could no more have committed
a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed
him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.

"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most
fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.

"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there?
Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water,
first."

"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk
who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts
terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that
red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent
to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant
refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of
an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation
of a wounded beast. The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his
mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them. It is only
fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for
prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am
relating came to pass.

Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.

"I have done nothing to be arrested for," he ended, looking at the
superintendent with his round, honest eyes. "I only did my duty as
anybody else would. Now let me go. Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can
get a decent night's lodging, for I am going home to-morrow. I've had
enough of this city. I want to go home!"

Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came
to this pathetic end. Every man in the station, from the most hardened
observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved. Isaac
himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the
prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants
can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been
cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest
people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned
again.

The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts)
busied themselves with bringing him to. From an opposite bench the
murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed
him. There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in
a body of iron. He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from
physical weakness, but because of mental anguish. Such an apparent
disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the
saloon-keeper's experience before.

"He is the only witness, you say, officer?" inquired the chief. "Are
you sure?"

"Yes, sorr!"

"We'll have to hold him, then. It's a great pity. I don't suppose he
could get a ten-dollar bail." The superintendent shook his gray head
thoughtfully. His subordinates did the same, with an exaggerated air
of distress.

"Where am I? Oh!" What horror in that exhalation, as Isaac realized
the place he was in! He staggered to his feet.

"Give me my bag, quick!" he exclaimed. "I will go."

"I'm afraid you can't go yet." The superintendent spoke as if he hated
to do his duty.

"Not go? Why not? You have no right to hold an innocent man!"

"In cases of assault and murder, the witnesses must be held until they
can furnish bail. That is the law." The white-haired man hurried his
explanation, as if he were ashamed of it.

"I will come back."

The officer shook his head.

"I give you my word I will." Isaac clasped the rail pleadingly.

"I'll have to lock you up to-night; the judge will settle the amount
of your bail to-morrow."

"Lock me up? I tell you I have no friends here! How can I get bail?
Where will you put me?"

"Show him his cell," replied the chief to his sergeant.

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