Ponsonby had taken the deposition and read it through, frowning over the same incriminating words he was to hear uttered aloud three months later in the County Courthouse (“very slow and halting,” the detective had explained): One — at — a time… I-did-not… we… quarrelled... Ann. That’s-a-fallacy; that’s-not-right… Actually it was noose... Indian.
At last he lowered the paper to his lap. “But Nicholas certainly knew the young man’s name. If it was Samuel Greatheart whom he meant, why didn’t he come right out and say so?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll bet that the County Attorney is going to introduce medical testimony to the effect that a man who’s had a bad concussion can sometimes remember most of what happened to him and still forget the commonest details — even his own name sometimes.”
“But surely Samuel isn’t the only Indian in Briarwood?”
“There are seventeen American Indians and two Indians from India. But even though Ann Twining refuses to believe Sam’s guilty, she admits he’s the only one of them her father had any contact with — the only Indian he ever even knew, she thinks. So when the police heard that, they started checking and everything just seemed to fall into place.”
“What do you mean by ‘everything’?”
“Well, motive for one. Sam and Ann wanted to get married and they admit Professor Twining was dead-set against it. Apparently he didn’t want his daughter marrying an Indian, especially one who has nothing in the world but a football scholarship and the shirt on his back.”
“Poppycock! In some ways Nicholas Twining was a very old-fashioned man and he may have thought Ann too young to marry, but he was no bigot. I’ll stake my life that Samuel Greatheart’s being an Indian had nothing to do with Nicholas’ opposition to the match.”
“Maybe not, Uncle Amos, but Sam himself admits to having had a couple of blazing rows with him about it, and anyone who’s seen him play football knows he’s got an unholy temper. I also understand the County Attorney can produce a witness who’ll testify to having heard Professor Twining refer to Sam as ‘that damned Indian,’ so apparently there was no love lost on his side, either.”
“Nonsense! When we’re vexed with someone we all choose the readiest handle for our whip. In my mind I refer to Mrs. Garvey as ‘that damned woman’ twenty’ times a week, but I certainly don’t intend it as a serious indictment of either her or her sex.”
Paul grinned. “I didn’t think you two ever quarreled.”
“Oh, we have our—” Ponsonby stiffened. “What was that?”
“I said I thought everything was always sweetness and light between you two.” Paul regarded his godfather quizzically. “Why? Did I say something wrong?”
“No. No, it’s just that for a moment there—” Ponsonby hesitated, frowning uncertainly; then he dismissed the interruption with a wave of his hand. “But tell me, what else do they have against Samuel Greatheart?”
“Well, there’s opportunity. Sam says he was in his room from seven o’clock on that evening studying for a physics exam, but even though there are one hundred and fifty other boys in that dorm and Sam knows most of them, he can’t produce a single witness to his being there. On top of which he failed that exam the next day, even though physics is a subject he generally does well in. Of course he blames it on his being upset over his row with Professor Twining.”
“As understandably he would be.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t it be even more understandable if he’d almost killed a man the night before?”
Ponsonby regarded his godson speculatively. “Tell me, Paul, you sound as though you think he’s guilty. Do you?”
Paul Anders leaned forward in his chair, propping his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what to think, Uncle Amos. I want to believe him, and when I talked with him this morning he sounded so darned sincere I couldn’t help but believe him. But then I walked out of that cell and came right up against a deathbed confession. Some detective says, ‘Who did it?’ and Professor Twining says Indian, and it’s the last thing he ever does say. How can I explain that to a jury even if I do believe Sam myself? What sort of defense can I possibly hope to offer?”
“Well, I would certainly look into the whereabouts of those other nineteen Indians. And I would certainly throw Luther Cobb at the jury as a far more likely candidate for murder. And when you consider all the evidence against Cobb — a man with a history of violence, whose fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, who turned up the next day with the victim’s money in his pocket, then lied about how he’d come by it.”
Paul shook his head disconsolately. “That’s all just circumstantial evidence, Uncle Amos. It couldn’t stand up against a deathbed identification.”
Ponsonby snorted. “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Paul grinned. “Say, that’s good. Do you mind if I use it sometime?”
“If you do, be sure to credit our friend Thoreau. That’s another of his gems — from his Journal, I believe.”
Ponsonby realized with a start that the courtroom crowd was stirring, stretching, getting to its feet. “What’s happening?” he asked of no one in particular.
“Recess until ten o’clock tomorrow,” said a man beside him.
Ponsonby glanced at the front of the room. The judge and jury had gone and Paul was seated again at the defense table in a brow-to-brow huddle with his client. “Damn it all!” he thought. “I’ve been woolgathering all through the lad’s cross-examination.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much,” his godson assured him an hour later on Ponsonby’s front porch, cool drinks in hand and the aroma of Mrs. Garvey’s dinner preparations wafting faintly through the screen door.
“Then you couldn’t shake the sergeant’s testimony?” Ponsonby asked.
“No more than I was able to shake the nurse and the orderly. Oh, I got the sergeant to repeat how halting Professor Twining’s delivery was that night, and how hard it was to tell whether he was mumbling words or just gasping for breath. And I managed to emphasize what the sergeant kept calling his ‘dopey expression’ — you know, as though the Professor’s mind had really been somewhere else.
“But that won’t be enough to save Sam. All the County Attorney has to do is point out to the jury what a monstrous coincidence it would be, if Professor Twining was really just mumbling delirious nonsense, that out of the half million words in the English language he just happened to hit on Indian as the last one he ever spoke. And if he wasn’t just mumbling deliriously, what was he more likely trying to say than ‘it was that Indian who hit me and someone ought to make a noose and string him up’ — or something like that.”
“Nonsense! Nicholas would never have been that bloodthirsty. And as for coincidence, if Samuel Greatheart is innocent, then there has to be a coincidence of some sort involved. There virtually always is in a miscarriage of justice — look at those poor devils who’ve gone to prison because they just happened to look like someone else and been unable to account for their whereabouts when that someone else was committing a crime. What are the odds against that occurring? And yet it has, and all too often.
“But I don’t think the coincidence here lies in that last word, Paul; doubtless Nicholas had some reason for saying it, even if we never know what it was. No, I think the coincidence here is that out of sixteen hundred Briarwood students, it just happened to be one of our nineteen Indians who was courting Ann Twining. If Samuel Greatheart were an Oriental or a Caucasian he wouldn’t even be on trial, but he happens to be a Shoshone, and so he is about to be condemned by one unfortunate word.”