He ordered the confession read, and directed the girl to stand up. Taylor tried again to protest, but he was forced down into his chair. The girl stood up bravely, but she was white as plaster, and her eyes dilated. She was asked if she still adhered to the confession and understood the consequences of it, and, although she trembled from head to toe, she spoke out distinctly. There was a moment of silence and the Judge was about to speak, when another voice filled the court-room. I turned about on my book to find my head against my Uncle Abner’s legs.
“I challenge the confession!” he said.
The whole court-room moved. Every eye was on the two tragic figures standing up: the slim, pale girl and the big, somber figure of my uncle. The Judge was astounded.
“On what ground?” he said.
“On the ground,” replied my uncle, “that the confession is a lie!”
One could have heard a pin fall anywhere in the whole room. The girl caught her breath in a little gasp, and the prisoner, Taylor, half rose and then sat down as though his knees were too weak to bear him. The Judge’s mouth opened, but for a moment or two he did not speak, and I could understand his amazement. Here was Abner assailing a confession which he himself had supported before the Judge, and speaking for the innocence of a woman whom he himself had shown to be guilty and taking one position privately, and another publicly. What did the man mean? And I was not surprised that the Judge’s voice was stern when he spoke.
“This is irregular,” he said. “It may be that this woman lulled Marsh, or it may be that Taylor killed him, and there is some collusion between these persons, as you appear to suggest. And you may know something to throw light on the matter, or you may not. However that may be, this is not the time for me to hear you. You will have ample opportunity to speak when I come to try the case.”
“But you will never try this case!” said Abner.
I cannot undertake to describe the desperate interest that lay on the people in the courtroom. They were breathlessly silent; one could hear the voices from the village outside, and the sounds of men and horses that came up through the open windows. No one knew what hidden thing Abner drove at. But he was a man who meant what he said, and the people knew it.
The Judge turned on him with a terrible face.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean,” replied Abner, and it was in his deep, hard voice, “that you must come down from the bench.”
The Judge was in a heat of fury.
“You are in contempt,” he roared. “I order your arrest. Sheriff!” he called.
But Abner did not move. He looked the man calmly in the face.
“You threaten me,” he said, “but God Almighty threatens you.” And he turned about to the audience. “The authority of the law,” he said, “is in the hands of the electors of this county. Will they stand up?”
I shall never forget what happened then, for I have never in my life seen anything so deliberate and impressive. Slowly, in silence, and without passion, as though they were in a church of God, men began to get up in the courtroom.
Randolph was the first. He was a justice of the peace, vain and pompous, proud of the abilities of an ancestry that he did not inherit. And his superficialities were the annoyance of my Uncle Abner’s life. But whatever I may have to say of him hereafter I want to say this thing of him here, that his bigotry and his vanities were builded on the foundations of a man. He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do, and he faced the Judge calmly above his great black stock. And I learned then that a man may be a blusterer and a lion.
Hiram Arnold got up, and Rockford, and Armstrong, and Alkire, and Coopman, and Monroe, and Elnathan Stone, and my father, Lewis, and Dayton and Ward, and Madison from beyond the mountains. And it seemed to me that the very hills and valleys were standing up.
It was a strange and instructive thing to see. The loudmouthed and the reckless were in that courtroom, men who would have shouted in a political convention, or run howling with a mob, but they were not the persons who stood up when Abner called upon the authority of the people to appear. Men rose whom one would not have looked to see—the blacksmith, the saddler, and old Asa Divers. And I saw that law and order and all the structure that civilization had builded up, rested on the sense of justice that certain men carried in their breasts, and that those who possessed it not, in the crisis of necessity, did not count.
Father Donovan stood up; he had a little flock beyond the valley river, and he was as poor, and almost as humble as his Master, but he was not afraid; and Bronson, who preached Calvin, and Adam Rider, who traveled a Methodist circuit.
No one of them believed in what the other taught; but they all believed in justice, and when the line was drawn, there was but one side for them all.
The last man up was Nathaniel Davisson, but the reason was that he was very old, and he had to wait for his sons to help him. He had been time and again in the Assembly of Virginia, at a time when only a gentleman and landowner could sit there. He was a just man, and honorable and unafraid.
The Judge, his face purple, made a desperate effort to enforce his authority. He pounded on his desk and ordered the sheriff to clear the courtroom. But the sheriff remained standing apart. He did not lack for courage, and I think he would have faced the people if his duty had been that way. His attitude was firm, and one could mark no uncertainty upon him, but he took no step to obey what the Judge commanded.
The Judge cried out at him in a terrible voice.
“I am the representative of the law here. Go on!”
The sheriff was a plain man, and unacquainted with the nice expressions of Mr. Jefferson, but his answer could not have been better if that gentleman had written it out for him.
“I would obey the representative of the law,” he said, “if I were not in the presence of the law itself!”
The Judge rose. “This is revolution,” he said; “I will send to the Governor for the militia.”
It was Nathaniel Davisson who spoke then. He was very old and the tremors of dissolution were on him, but his voice was steady.
“Sit down, your Honor,” he said. “There is no revolution here, and you do not require troops to support your authority. We are here to support it if it ought to be lawfully enforced. But the people have elevated you to the Bench because they believed in your integrity, and if they have been mistaken they would know it.” He paused, as though to collect his strength, and then went on. “The presumptions of right are all with your Honor. You administer the law upon our authority and we stand behind you. Be assured that we will not suffer our authority to be insulted in your person.” His voice grew deep and resolute. “It is a grave thing to call us up against you, and not lightly, nor for a trivial reason shall my man dare to do it.” Then he turned about. “Now, Abner,” he said, “what is this thing?”
Young as I was, I felt that the old man spoke for the people standing in the courtroom, with their voice and their authority, and I began to fear that the measure which my uncle had taken was high handed. But he stood there like the shadow of a great rock.
“I charge him,” he said, “with the murder of Elihu Marsh! And I call upon him to vacate the Bench.”
When I think about this extraordinary event now, I wonder at the calmness with which Simon Kilrail met this blow, until I reflect that he had seen it on its way, and had got ready to meet it. But even with that preparation, it took a man of iron nerve to face an assault like that and keep every muscle in its place. He had tried violence and had failed with it, and he had recourse now to the attitudes and mannerisms of a judicial dignity. He sat with his elbows on the table, and his clenched fingers propping up his jaw. He looked coldly at Abner, but he did not speak, and there was silence until Nathaniel Davisson spoke for him. His face and his voice were like iron.
“No, Abner,” he said, “he shall not vacate the Bench for that, nor upon the accusation of any man. We will have your proofs,
if you please.”
The Judge turned his cold face from Abner to Nathaniel Davisson, and then he looked over the men standing in the courtroom.
“I am not going to remain here,” he said, “to be tried by a mob, upon the viva voce indictment of a bystander. You may nullify your court, if you like, and suspend the forms of law for yourselves, but you cannot nullify the constitution of Virginia, nor suspend my right as a citizen of that commonwealth.
“And now,” he said, rising, “if you will kindly make way, I will vacate this courtroom, which your violence has converted into a chamber of sedition.”
The man spoke in a cold, even voice, and I thought he had presented a difficulty that could not be met. How could these men before him understand to keep the peace of this frontier, and force its lawless elements to submit to the forms of law for trial, and deny any letter of those formalities to this man? Was the grand jury, and the formal indictment, and all the right and privilege of an orderly procedure for one, and not for another?
It was Nathaniel Davisson who met this dangerous problem.
“We are not concerned,” he said, “at this moment with your rights as a citizen; the rights of private citizenship are inviolate, and they remain to you, when you return to it. But you are not a private citizen. You are our agent. We have selected you to administer the law for us, and your right to act has been challenged. Well, as the authority behind you, we appear and would know the reason.”
The Judge retained his imperturbable calm.
“Do you hold me a prisoner here?” he said.
“We hold you an official in your office,” replied Davisson, “not only do we refuse to permit you to leave the courtroom, but we refuse to permit you to leave the Bench. This court shall remain as we have set it up until it is our will to readjust it. And it shall not be changed at the pleasure or demand of any man but by us only, and for a sufficient cause shown to us.”
And again I was anxious for my uncle, for I saw how grave a thing it was to interfere with the authority of the people as manifested in the forms and agencies of the law. Abner must be very sure of the ground under him.
And he was sure. He spoke now, with no introductory expressions, but directly and in the simplest words.
“These two persons,” he said, indicating Taylor and the girl, “have each been willing to die in order to save the other. Neither is guilty of this crime. Taylor has kept silent, and the girl has lied, to the same end. This is the truth: There was a lovers’ quarrel, and Taylor left the country precisely as he told us, except the motive, which he would not tell lest the girl be involved. And the woman, to save him, confesses to a crime that she did not commit.
“Who did commit it?” He paused and included Storm with a gesture. “We suspected this woman because Marsh had been killed by poison in his bread, and afterwards mutilated with a shot. Yesterday we rode out with the Judge to put those facts before him.” Again he paused. “An incident occurring in that interview indicated that we were wrong; a second incident assured us, and still later, a third convinced us. These incidents were, first, that the Judge’s watch had run down; second, that we found in his library a book with all the leaves in it uncut, except at one certain page; and, third, that we found in the county clerk’s office an unindexed record in an old deed book.” There was deep quiet and he went on:
“In addition to the theory of Taylor’s guilt or this woman’s, there was still a third; but it had only a single incident to support it, and we feared to suggest it until the others had been explained. This theory was that someone, to benefit by Marsh’s death, had planned to kill him in such a manner as to throw suspicion on this woman who baked his bread, and finding Taylor gone, and the gun above the mantel, yielded to an afterthought to create a further false evidence. It was overdone!
“The trigger guard of the gun in the recoil caught in the chain of the assassin’s watch and jerked it out of his pocket; he replaced the watch, but not the key which fell to the floor, and which I picked up beside the body of the dead man.”
Abner turned toward the judge.
“And so,” he said, “I charge Simon Kilrail with this murder; because the key winds his watch; because the record in the old deed book is a conveyance by the heirs of Marsh’s lands to him at the life tenant’s death; and because the book we found in his library is a book on poisons with the leaves uncut, except at the very page describing that identical poison with which Elihu Marsh was murdered.”
The strained silence that followed Abner’s words was broken by a voice that thundered in the courtroom. It was Randolph’s.
“Come down!” he said.
And this time Nathaniel Davisson was silent.
The Judge got slowly on his feet, a resolution was forming in his face, and it advanced swiftly.
“I will give you my answer in a moment,” he said.
Then he turned about and went into his room behind the Bench. There was but one door, and that opening into the court, and the people waited.
The windows were open and we could see the green fields, and the sun, and the far-off mountains, and the peace and quiet and serenity of autumn entered. The Judge did not appear. Presently there was the sound of a shot from behind the closed door. The sheriff threw it open, and upon the floor, sprawling in a smear of blood, lay Simon Kilrail, with a dueling pistol in his hand.
The Game Played in the Dark
Ernest Bramah
During the two decades 1900–1920 authors strove for originality and diversity and endeavoured to create detectives who were either in some way handicapped or developed special skills. Thus we have Richard Marsh’s stories about Judith Lee, a teacher for the deaf and mute and thus able to lip read, or Fred Jackson’s stories about Kristian White, the wheelchair detective (fifty years before TV’s Ironside), or Arthur Stringer’s Witter Kerfoot who cannot sleep and spends his nights encountering crime, or Sax Rohmer’s stories about Moris Klaw, the Dream Detective, who simply sleeps at the site of the crime and has visions about how it was committed.
The list is very long, but amongst them, and regarded as including some of the best detective fiction of the period, was Max Carrados, the blind detective. He was the creation of Ernest Bramah (1868–1942), a rather enigmatic character who liked to keep himself to himself (to the extent that people came to believe that he didn’t exist and that the name was a pseudonym) and who had two unsuccessful careers as a farmer and journalist before he turned to writing. Bramah had already experimented with some stories in the mid 1890s creating the character of Kai Lung, a Chinese teller of tales. The early stories, which exist in a mock-historical period and bear comparison with the Arabian Nights, were collected as The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900).
Bramah continued to write Kai Lung stories for the rest of his life but also turned to other books and in 1913 he began his series about Max Carrados. At the outset, Carrados is not a detective, though in an early story he muses that he might make a good one. Like his creator, Carrados is a coin expert and is consulted by a detective over whether a coin is real or a fake. Because of his blindness, Carrados has developed his other senses over the years, but if he needs any visual help he relies on his manservant, Parkinson. The stories in the first series develop to the point where Carrados has become a nuisance to certain villains and they decide to take care of him, and it is in the following story that Carrados’s true abilities come into their own.
“IT’S a funny thing, sir,” said Inspector Beedel, regarding Mr. Carrados with the pensive respect that he always extended towards the blind amateur, “it’s a funny thing, but nothing seems to go on abroad now but what you’ll find some trace of it here in London if you take the trouble to look.”
“In the right quarter,” contributed Carrados.
“Why, yes,” agreed the inspector. “But nothing comes of it nine times out of ten, because it’s no one’s particular business to look here or the thing’s been taken up and finished from the other end. I don’t mean ordinary mur
ders or single-handed burglaries, of course, but—a modest ring of professional pride betrayed the quiet enthusiast—real First-Class Crimes.”
“The State Antonio Five percent Bond Coupons?” suggested Carrados.
“Ah, you are right, Mr. Carrados.” Beedel shook his head sadly, as though perhaps on that occasion someone ought to have looked. “A man has a fit in the inquiry office of the Agent-General for British Equatoria, and two hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of faked securities is the result in Mexico. Then look at that jade fylfot charm pawned for one-and-three down at the Basin and the use that could have been made of it in the Kharkov ‘ritual murder’ trial.”
“The West Hampstead Lost Memory puzzle and the Baripur bomb conspiracy that might have been smothered if one had known.”
“Quite true, sir. And the three children of that Chicago millionaire—Cyrus V. Bunting, wasn’t it?—kidnapped in broad daylight outside the New York Lyric and here, three weeks later, the dumb girl who chalked the wall at Charing Cross. I remember reading once in a financial article that every piece of foreign gold had a string from it leading to Threadneedle Street. A figure of speech, sir, of course, but apt enough, I don’t doubt. Well, it seems to me that every big crime done abroad leaves a finger-print here in London—if only, as you say, we look in the right quarter.”
“And at the right moment,” added Carrados. “The time is often the present; the place the spot beneath our very noses. We take a step and the chance has gone forever.”
The inspector nodded and contributed a weighty monosyllable of sympathetic agreement. The most prosaic of men in the pursuit of his ordinary duties, it nevertheless subtly appealed to some half-dormant streak of vanity to have his profession taken romantically when there was no serious work on hand.
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