Ridgway of Montana (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain)

by William MacLeod Raine

  CHAPTER 22. "NOT GUILTY"--"GUILTY"

  Ridgway's answer to the latest move of Simon Harley was to put him ontrial for his life to answer the charge of having plotted andinstigated the death of Vance Edwards. Not without reason, the defensehad asked for a change of venue, alleging the impossibility of securinga fair trial at Mesa. The courts had granted the request and removedthe case to Avalanche.

  On the second day of the trial Aline sat beside her husband, a daintylittle figure of fear, shrinking from the observation focused upon herfrom all sides. The sight of her forlorn sensitiveness so touchedRidgway's heart that he telegraphed Virginia Balfour to come and helpsupport her through the ordeal.

  Virginia came, and henceforth two women, both of them young andunusually attractive, gave countenance to the man being tried for hislife. Not that he needed their support for himself, but for the effectthey might have on the jury. Harley had shrewdly guessed that thewhite-faced child he had married, whose pathetic beauty was of sohaunting a type, and whose big eyes were so quick to reflect emotions,would be a valuable asset to set against the black-clad widow of VanceEdwards.

  For its effect upon himself, so far as the trial was concerned, SimonHarley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wreckercarried an iron face to the ordeal. His leathern heart was as foreignto fear as to pity. The trial was an unpleasant bore to him, butnothing worse. He had, of course, cast an anchor of caution to windwardby taking care to have the jury fixed. For even though his array oflawyers was a formidably famous one, he was no such child as to trusthis case to a Western jury on its merits while the undercurrent ofpopular opinion was setting so strongly against him. Nor had heneglected to see that the court-room was packed with detectives tosafeguard him in the event that the sympathy of the attending minersshould at any time become demonstrative against him.

  The most irritating feature of the trial to the defendant was thepresence of the little woman in black, whose burning eyes never leftfor long his face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, butnobody in the court-room was more sure of that look of enduring,passionate hatred than its victim. He had made her a widow, and herheart cried for revenge. That was the story the eyes told dumbly.

  From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with therealization among those present--except for that somber figure inblack, whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant--that it was anothermove in the fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorneyhad worked up his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing aconviction, but to mass a total of evidence that would condemn theConsolidated leader-before the world.

  To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process ofsweating to turn State's evidence against his master. His testimonymade things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, apalpably unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgwayadherents were openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made muchof the fact that Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after adisagreement with the defendant and had been elected to the senate byhis enemies, but the impression made by his moderation and the finerestraint of his manner, combined with his reputation for scrupuloushonesty, was not to be shaken by the subtle innuendos and bluntaspersions of the legal array he faced.

  Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart'stestimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a badhour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley hadpersonally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for thealmost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him timeto recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.

  Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotelelevator--for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found itnecessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best,an alternative not to his fastidious taste--rallied him upon thepredicament in which he had found himself.

  "It's pretty hard to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing butthe truth, without making indiscreet admissions about one's friends,isn't it?" he asked, with his genial smile.

  "Did I make any indiscreet admissions?"

  "I don't say you did, though you didn't look as if you were enjoyingyourself. I picked up an impression that you had your back to the wall;seemed to me the jury rather sized it up that way, Mott."

  "We'll know what the jury thinks in a few days."

  "Shall we?" the other laughed aloud. "Now, I'm wondering whether weshall know what they really think."

  "If you mean that the jury has been tampered with it is your duty toplace your evidence before the court, Mr. Ridgway."

  "When I hear the verdict I'll tell you what I think about the jury,"returned the president of the Ore-producing Company, with easyimpudence as he passed into the elevator.

  At the second floor Waring left it and turned toward the ladies'parlor. It had seemed to him that Aline had looked very tired and frailat the morning session, and he wanted to see Virginia about arrangingto have them take a long drive into the country that afternoon. He hadsent his card up with a penciled note to the effect that he would waitfor her in the parlor.

  But when he stepped through the double doorway of the ornate room itwas to become aware of a prior occupant. She was reclining on a divanat the end of the large public room. Neither lying nor sitting, butpropped up among a dozen pillows with head and limbs inert and the longlashes drooped on the white cheeks, Aline looked the pathetic figure ofa child fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion after a long strain.

  Since he was the man he was, unhampered by any too fine sense of whatwas fitting, he could no more help approaching than he could help thepassionate pulse of pity that stirred in his heart at sight of herforlorn weariness.

  Her eyes opened to find his grave compassion looking down at her. Sheshowed no surprise at his presence, though she had not previously knownof it. Nor did she move by even so much as the stir of a limb.

  "This is wearing you out," he said, after the long silence in which hergaze was lost helplessly in his. "You must go home--away from it all.You must forget it, and if it ever crosses your mind think of it assomething with which you have no concern."

  "How can I do that--now."

  The last word slipped out not of her will, but from an undisciplinedheart. It stood for the whole tangled story of her troubles: theunloved marriage which had bereft her of her heritage of youth and joy,the love that had found her too late and was so poignant a fount ofdistress to her, the web of untoward circumstance in which she was soinextricably entangled.

  "How did you ever come to do it?" he asked roughly, out of the bitterimpulse of his heart.

  She knew that the harshness was not for her, as surely as she knew whathe meant by his words.

  "I did wrong. I know that now, but I didn't know it then. Though eventhen I felt troubled about it. But my guardian said it was best, and Iknew so little. Oh, so very, very little. Why was I not taught things,what every girl has a right to know--until life teaches me--too late?"

  Nothing he could say would comfort her. For the inexorable factsforbade consolation. She had made shipwreck of her life before thefrail raft of her destiny had well pushed forth from harbor. He wouldhave given much to have been able to take the sadness out of her greatchildeyes, but he knew that not even by the greatness of his desirecould he take up her burden. She must carry it alone or sink under it.

  "You must go away from here back to your people. If not now, then assoon as the trial is over. Make him take you to your friends for atime."

  "I have no friends that can help me." She said it in an even littlevoice of despair.

  "You have many friends. You have made some here. Virginia is one." Hewould not name himself as only a friend, though he had set his ironwill to claim no more.

  "Yes, Virginia is my friend. She is good to me. But she is going tomarry you, and then you will both forget me."

  "I shall never forget you." He cried
it in a low, tense voice, hisclenched hands thrust into the pockets of his sack coat.

  Her wan smile thanked him. It was the most he would let himself say.Though her heart craved more, she knew she must make the most of this.

  "I came up to see Virginia," he went on, with a change of manner. "Iwant her to take you driving this afternoon. Forget about that wretchedtrial if you can. Nothing of importance will take place to-day."

  He turned at the sound of footsteps, and saw that Miss Balfour had comeinto the room.

  "I want you to take Mrs. Harley into the fresh sunshine and clear airthis afternoon. I have been telling her to forget this trial. It's afarce, anyhow. Nothing will come of it. Take her out to the Homes--takeand cheer her up."

  "Yes, my lord." Virginia curtseyed obediently.

  "It will do you good, too."

  She shot a mocking little smile at him. "It's very good of you to thinkof me."

  "Still, I do sometimes."

  "Whenever it is convenient," she added.

  But with Aline watching them the spirit of badinage in him wasovermatched. He gave it up and asked what kind of a rig he should sendround. Virginia furnished him the necessary specifications, and heturned to go.

  As he left the room Simon Harley entered. They met face to face, andafter an instant's pause each drew aside to allow the other to pass.The New Yorker inclined his head silently and moved forward toward hiswife. Ridgway passed down the corridor and into the elevator.

  As the days of the trial passed excitement grew more tense. The lawyersfor the prosecution and the defense made their speeches to a crowdedand enthralled court-room. There was a feverish uncertainty in the air.It reached a climax when the jury stayed out for eleven hours beforecoming to a verdict. From the moment it filed back into the court-roomwith solemn faces the dramatic tensity began to foreshadow the tragedyabout to be enacted. The woman Harley had made a widow sat erect andrigid in the seat where she had been throughout the trial. Her eyesblazed with a hatred that bordered madness. Ridgway had observed thatneither Aline Harley nor Virginia was present, and a note from thelatter had just reached him to the effect that Aline was ill with thestrain of the long trial. Afterward Ridgway could never thank his pagangods enough that she was absent.

  There was a moment of tense waiting before the judge asked:

  "Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

  The foreman rose. "We have, your honor."

  A folded note was handed to the judge. He read it slowly, with aninscrutable face.

  "Is this your verdict, gentlemen of the jury?"

  "It is, your honor."

  Silence, full and rigid, held the room after the words "Not guilty" hadfallen from the lips of the judge. The stillness was broken by a shockas of an electric bolt from heaven.

  The exploding echoes of a pistol-shot reverberated. Men sprang wildlyto their feet, gazing at each other in the distrust that feargenerates. But one man was beyond being startled by any more earthlysounds. His head fell forward on the table in front of him, and a thinstream of blood flowed from his lips. It was Simon Harley, foundguilty, sentenced, and executed by the judge and jury sitting in theoutraged, insane heart of the woman he had made a widow.

  Mrs. Edwards had shot him through the head with a revolver she hadcarried in her shoppingbag to exact vengeance in the event of amiscarriage of justice.