Argosy, Vol. 123, No. 1 — page 137: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SERAPION. interviewed her as well as her mistress, had warned me that she would prove a difficult antagonist, I had not fully believed him. Negroes in the average run are diffuse in their statements and easily muddled into self-contradiction. Sabina might prove so under cross-ex- amination, but I doubted it now. She had wasted hardly a word that morning, and there was only one point on which I was sure that she could be shaken. The difference in height between slayer and slain was a strong point for the prose- cution. Even through thin, black curtains it would indeed have been hard to confuse a tall silhouette with a short one. But no one had thought to question the identity of the tall silhouette. Though Sabina may have known better during the minutes that she stood staring through the curtains, her after and more vivid sight of Berquist, with hands “ drop- pin’ blood,” and his almost instant claim of the crime as his own, had served to make the tall man Berquist in all her memories. Berquist, the self-confessed! I had no faith in Orlow. Had Marx not dropped out, I should have been content to let the trial take its course, sure that his genius would somehow save the day and free my friend. But under Orlow’s han- dling, with that craggy, sullen, assured black woman to swear that Moore was not and could not have been the aggressor— since he stood with his left side to the table, grasping the tall silhouette with his right hand, and a man under impulse of passion is not likely to reach for a weapon with his left—I was morally certain that Berquist would lose out. But what if, rising on the stand, instead of a second perjury I told the simple truth? ~ Not that portion of it which included the superhuman, but just the fact that I, and not Berquist, had been swept by one of those sudden fits of red anger that have made murderers of many before me? Why, Sabina herself would support my words, once spoken! There was a little, unnoticed twist in her testimony—a point where the voice of Berquist, coming from beyond the table, became the voice of the tall man standing on her side of the lamp. 127 The instant that I spoke she would know. Her memories, unconsciously readjusted to fit facts as she had afterward learned them, would be straight again. Berquist’s hidden heroism would stand revealed, and I, though I died, I would at least die clean. Resolve crystallized suddenly within me. When Clemens called me to the stand I would go, not to testify, but to confess. I walked to the little raised platform, with the chair where the others had sat, below the double tier of jurymen. I mounted it. Somebody put a rusty black book under my hand and mumbled through a slurred rigmarole, to which my low acqui- escence was a prelude to ruin for me. I sat down in the chair. Beyond the rail was a packed level of faces. They were all pale and dreary- looking, it seemed to me, though that may have been an effect of light, for the day was gray and dreary. I had returned to court through falling snow. It was a wet, late spring fall of clinging flakes, and all the way I had been haunted by a memory of the “ dead-alive’’ house as I had seen it that night. Not the interior—not even the library, with its master, a grim gray and scarlet horror on the floor. But the house itself, desolate under its white burden, with the great flakes swirling down, hiding deeper and more deep the line of division between the living half and the dead. Berquist was sitting by a table with Orlow beside him. I had visited him in prison, of course, and talked with him a few moments just before the trial opened. His determination and courage had never swerved, nor his conviction that we had only to keep steady—and win. Now I saw his eyes as a dark and valiant glory fixed on me. Their message only hardened my resolve. That man to play the martyr for my sake? Never! Orlow left Nils, and took his stand con- veniently near. He was there to protect me from irrelevant questions, but he looked quite out of place. Clearly, the mantle of Helidore Marx did not rest easily on his shoulders. comicloool C©