The Right of Way | Page 5

of the gallery a woman laughed outright.
The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
angrily called "Silence!" towards the offending corner, and seven or
eight hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest--the judge,
the prisoner, and the prisoner's counsel. Perhaps more people looked at
the prisoner's counsel than at the prisoner, certainly far more than
looked at the judge.
Never was a verdict more unexpected. If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant.

The minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a
chance of escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient
evidence, but on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer. This minority
would not have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but
of outside spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a
criminal case, attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of
very young men, who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the
person good to see and hard to understand.
During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau. Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the
body of the victim had been found by the roadside. The prisoner was a
stranger in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there
had been morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to
tell even his lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring
witnesses from his home to speak for his character.
One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed
person in the courtroom.
Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often
looking out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill,
absorbed and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the
second day was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the
questions he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new
avenues of deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have
a longer reach than the moment or the hour.
Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon
him than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the
court-room could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used
during the afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look
at the judge meditatively. Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever
exasperated and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of
twenty-nine years of age, who had been known at college as Beauty
Steele, and who was still so spoken of familiarly; or was called as

familiarly, Charley Steele, by people who never had attempted to be
familiar with him.
The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner. The
coil of evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible.
That the evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was
upon the prisoner, that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when
he was arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not
weigh in the minds of the general public. The man's guilt was freely
believed; not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele
would yet get him off thought that he was innocent. There seemed no
flaw in the evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.
During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case:
was occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking
out of the window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner
where sat a half-dozen well-dressed ladies, and more particularly
towards one lady who watched him in a puzzled way--more than once
with a look of disappointment. Only at the very close of the sitting did
he appear to rouse himself. Then, for a brief ten minutes, he
cross-examined a friend of the murdered merchant in a fashion which
startled the court-room, for he suddenly brought out the fact that the
dead man had once struck a woman in the face in the open street. This
fact, sharply stated by the prisoner's counsel, with no explanation and
no comment, seemed uselessly intrusive and malicious. His ironical
smile merely irritated all concerned. The thin, clean-shaven face of the
prisoner grew more pinched