But herein they were mistaken.For when the constable had given his evidence, already known to the county, there was a disturbance in the fringe of humanity that lined the walls of the assembly room where the committee was sitting, and the hermit of Bolinas Plain limped painfully into the room.He had evidently walked there: he was soaked with rain and plastered with mud; he was exhausted and inarticulate.But as he staggered to the witness-bench, and elbowed the constable aside, he arrested the attention of every one.A few laughed, but were promptly silenced by the court.It was a reflection upon its only virtue,--sincerity.
"Do you know the prisoner?" asked the judge.
Ira Beasley glanced at the pale face of the acrobat, and shook his head.
"Never saw him before," he said faintly.
"Then what are you doing here?" demanded the judge sternly.
Ira collected himself with evident effort, and rose to his halting feet.First he moistened his dry lips, then he said, slowly and distinctly, "Because I killed the deputy of Bolinas."With the thrill which ran through the crowded room, and the relief that seemed to come upon him with that utterance, he gained strength and even a certain dignity.
"I killed him," he went on, turning his head slowly around the circle of eager auditors with the rigidity of a wax figure, "because he made love to my wife.I killed him because he wanted to run away with her.I killed him because I found him waiting for her at the door of the barn at the dead o' night, when she'd got outer bed to jine him.He hadn't no gun.He hadn't no fight.Ikilled him in his tracks.That man," pointing to the prisoner, "wasn't in it at all." He stopped, loosened his collar, and, baring his rugged throat below his disfigured ear, said: "Now take me out and hang me!""What proof have we of this? Where's your wife? Does she corroborate it?"A slight tremor ran over him.
"She ran away that night, and never came back again.Perhaps," he added slowly, "because she loved him and couldn't bear me; perhaps, as I've sometimes allowed to myself, gentlemen, it was because she didn't want to bear evidence agin me."In the silence that followed the prisoner was heard speaking to one that was near him.Then he rose.All the audacity and confidence that the husband had lacked were in HIS voice.Nay, there was even a certain chivalry in his manner which, for the moment, the rascal really believed.
"It's true!" he said."After I stole the horse to get away, Ifound that woman running wild down the road, cryin' and sobbin'.
At first I thought she'd done the shooting.It was a risky thing for me to do, gentlemen; but I took her up on the horse and got her away to Lowville.It was that much dead weight agin my chances, but I took it.She was a woman and--I ain't a dog!"He was so exalted and sublimated by his fiction that for the first time the jury was impressed in his favor.And when Ira Beasley limped across the room, and, extending his maimed hand to the prisoner, said, "Shake!" there was another dead silence.
It was broken by the voice of the judge addressing the constable.
"What do you know of the deputy's attentions to Mrs.Beasley? Were they enough to justify the husband's jealousy? Did he make love to her?"The constable hesitated.He was a narrow man, with a crude sense of the principles rather than the methods of justice.He remembered the deputy's admiration; he now remembered, even more strongly, the object of that admiration, simulating with her pretty arms the gestures of the barkeeper, and the delight it gave them.
He was loyal to his dead leader, but he looked up and down, and then said, slowly and half-defiantly: "Well, judge, he was a MAN."Everybody laughed.That the strongest and most magic of all human passions should always awake levity in any public presentment of or allusion to it was one of the inconsistencies of human nature which even a lynch judge had to admit.He made no attempt to control the tittering of the court, for he felt that the element of tragedy was no longer there.The foreman of the jury arose and whispered to the judge amid another silence.Then the judge spoke:--"The prisoner and his witness are both discharged.The prisoner to leave the town within twenty-four hours; the witness to be conducted to his own house at the expense of, and with the thanks of, the Committee."They say that one afternoon, when a low mist of rain had settled over the sodden Bolinas Plain, a haggard, bedraggled, and worn-out woman stepped down from a common "freighting wagon" before the doorway where Beasley still sat; that, coming forward, he caught her in his arms and called her "Sue;" and they say that they lived happily together ever afterwards.But they say--and this requires some corroboration--that much of that happiness was due to Mrs.
Beasley's keeping forever in her husband's mind her own heroic sacrifice in disappearing as a witness against him, her own forgiveness of his fruitless crime, and the gratitude he owed to the fugitive.