The County Attorney bowed almost imperceptibly, as though fearful of cracking his paper-thin veneer of contrition.
“Blasted hypocrite!” muttered Ponsonby. The deliberate transgression, he knew, had been a telling point for the prosecution. Nurse Gebhorn had testified that Professor Twining had mumbled and and then let his sentence die, and the orderly had been quite certain that the word had been either ant or aunt. But since Professor Twining’s only daughter was named Ann, the sergeant’s testimony would undoubtedly strike the jury as representing the most likely interpretation.
And what was worse, all three witnesses had now testified to having heard those deadly words — we and quarreled.
“All right, Sergeant,” the County Attorney continued, “let’s take it from where the deceased uttered what you, a trained observer, understood to be the name Ann. What happened next?”
“Well, sir, then there was a long period of silence — so long that if Professor Twining’s eyes hadn’t been open and moving I’d have thought he’d passed out again. And I was getting nervous, so I said, hoping to sort of stimulate him, ‘Was it Luther Cobb who hit you?’ ”
“And did he reply to that?”
“Yes, sir, he sure did. All this time he’d been lying there with a kind of dopey look on his face, but when I asked him if it was Luther Cobb that hit him he looked right at us, very deliberate like, and he said real clear: That’s a fallacy. That’s not right.”
“I see. He denied that it was Luther Cobb who’d struck him. What happened next?”
“He shut his eyes again, and I got to thinking what the Chief would say if I found out who didn’t hit him instead of who did, so I asked again, ‘Professor Twining, who was it that did this to you?’ And that’s when he said it.”
The County Attorney stood quietly for several moments, letting the irresistible magnet of whetted curiosity rivet the jury’s attention to his next question. Only when the tension in the room was almost palpable did he ask, “What did he say, Sergeant?”
“Well, sir, Professor Twining opened his eyes again, still looking right at me, and he said, Actually, it was— But then his voice sort of trailed off again, and he turned his eyes toward the ceiling, sort of puzzled like, as though he saw something up there that he couldn’t quite make out, and then he said a word I didn’t quite get, but I think it was noose—”
A wave of laughter swept the courtroom, momentarily easing the tension. Ponsonby chuckled with the others as he recalled the testimony of the previous witnesses: young Horace Cayther, who was known to all Briarwood as an ardent hunter, had been certain the dying man had mumbled the word moose, while Nurse Gebhorn had distinctly heard it as juice.
The judge gaveled for silence. The laughter died, the tension snapped back into place.
“And then?” prompted the County Attorney.
Sergeant Means took a deep breath, as though he were exhausted by the weight of what he was about to speak. “Then Professor Twining looked right at me again, and he said, clear as a bell, Indian. Then he just closed his eyes and stopped breathing.”
The County Attorney turned slowly to face the jury; he remained facing them as he framed his final question. “Let me make quite certain that we all understood you correctly, Sergeant. When you asked Professor Twining, ‘Who was it that did this to you?’, he replied, Actually, it was, and then a word you aren’t entirely sure of but which could have been noose, and then, clear as a bell, the word Indian. And having said that, he died. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Your witness, Mr. Anders.”
So there it was, thought Ponsonby: that inescapable, seemingly unchallengeable word Indian, testified to now by three solid, reliable witnesses. Of course Nurse Gebhorn thought the dying man had said Indians, making it plural, and perhaps the defense could do something with that.
But do what? he asked himself sarcastically — suggest to the jury that the entire Shoshone nation had attacked Nicholas Twining? No, if there were any way Paul could save his client, it lay in finding some logical explanation for Nicholas Twining’s last, devastatingly incriminating word. Which was exactly what Ponsonby had been trying to do ever since Paul first told him of the deathbed accusation against Samuel Greatheart, and so far Ponsonby hadn’t come close to finding such an explanation.
Or had he? As he watched the Public Defender rise to begin his gallant but futile cross-examination, Ponsonby let his thoughts drift back to the morning several months before when Paul had first shown him the transcript of Sergeant Means’s preliminary testimony. Hadn’t there been a moment that morning when he’d sensed that there was an explanation lurking just over the horizon of his memory if only he could reach out and pull it into the daylight?
It had, he remembered, been a lovely April morning in his sunlit study on Spring Street…
Ponsonby had laid down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and peered at his housekeeper over the rim of his spectacles. “Mrs. Garvey?”
Mrs. Garvey had sighed and straightened up from her task of watering the potted ferns in the broad bay window. She had known what was coming — the Professor frequently used her as a sounding board for his latest “scribblings,” as she thought of them, even though they often dealt with subjects whose very existence was a profound revelation to her. “Yes, love?” she asked resignedly.
“Tell me how this sounds to you — it’s a commemorative passage on Professor Twining which I’ve been asked to prepare for the Faculty Minutes.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Garvey, brightening. Here was something more to her liking — a real-life murder that had bestirred their quiet college community as no other event in thirty years, a topic far more satisfying than those bloodless, bodiless scandals — “the unwarranted prostitution of our mother tongue” — that the Professor was always going on about in letters to the Briarwood newspaper.
Adjusting his spectacles more firmly on his nose, Ponsonby returned his attention to the passage.
“ ‘Nicholas Albert Twining,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘Roylston Professor of English at Briarwood College, died April fourth in his fifty-first year. For twenty-two years Professor Twining was an inspired and inspiring teacher, a productive scholar and a warm and generous friend to an ever-widening circle of students and colleagues. An expert in Nineteenth Century American literature, particularly the Transcendentalists, he so leavened wisdom with wit as to make himself loved as well as respected by all who took his courses. His scholarly legacy includes four books, at least one of which, Sunlight on Walden Pond, deservedly earned him national acclaim. At the time of his death he was working on a Life of Thoreau to which he had devoted four years of energy, and enthusiasm beyond measure.
“ ‘Although loathe at any time to part with this blithe and ebullient spirit, we yet may find comfort in the fact that he has left us at a time of year when a reawakening world can remind us, in the words of that Concord rebel whom Nicholas Twining knew so well and admired so much, that our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.’ ”
Professor Ponsonby lowered the paper and peered expectantly at his housekeeper.