The witnesses were waiting in the hall outside the courtroom under the watchful eye of Constable Presnell, who would usher in each one in turn as he was summoned to testify. I glanced at the list of names that I had duly copied from the back of Mr. Alexander’s indictment. There were thirteen names on the list, members of the Silver clan, their backcountry neighbors who had made up the search party; the two constables involved in the arrest of the defendant; and our own Dr. Tate to provide the medical evidence concerning the cause of death and the nature of the wounds.
In my short tenure as clerk of court, I had become quite a connoisseur of witnesses. I never failed to marvel at a great bull of a man who creeps onto the witness stand and squeaks like a mouse, his eyes bulging with fright to be under the scrutiny of so great an audience. Other people give evidence in calm, measured tones as if they were ordering up a new suit, instead of swearing away the life of a fellow citizen. Some witnesses seethe with anger as they recount the misdeeds of the accused, or weep piteously if they are compelled to bear witness against a loved one. I wondered what sort of witnesses today’s trial would offer, and I was fairly certain that no tears would be shed, for on that list of names I saw not one that could be counted as a friend of the defendant. I wondered why Mrs. Silver’s mother and brother had not been called upon to testify, for when we sent them away in January it was under bond, with the understanding that they would return to give evidence in the trial. Perhaps neither attorney feels that he can trust them, I decided. One lawyer must fear that they would lie, and the other is equally afraid that they might speak the whole truth. The trial would proceed without their testimony.
Jack Collis made a good witness. He was a wiry old man with the keen blue eyes of a woodsman. He looked about sixty, and he had lived on the frontier all his life, farming and tracking animals for fur and food. His authority as a tracker could not be questioned. If his clothing was not all that one could hope for in a formal court of law, at least he was tolerably clean. Although he spoke up in a clear voice that carried well in the courtroom, he kept his answers short and to the point. Not a man for social conversation, I thought.
Yes, he had been in the search party for Charlie Silver. No, he had not seen any evidence of the missing man in the woods or in the iced-over river.
“And what did you do then, sir?”
“I figured on searching the cabin.”
“Why?”
“Because he wasn’t anywhere else.”
“Because there was not a sign of Charles Silver between his folks’ place and George Young’s, where his wife said he had gone?”
“That’s right.”
“When did you go to the cabin?”
“Sunday morning. The eighth of January, it was. While we were out searching the woods, I chanced to hear somebody saying that Frankie had gone back to her folks’ place over the river. I figured it couldn’t do no harm to look around in Charlie’s cabin.”
“Did you go by yourself?”
“Yes. It wasn’t but a long shot. I just thought I’d have a look.”
“So you went to the Silver homestead. Could you describe the interior of the cabin for the jury, Mr. Collis?”
The frontiersman blinked. “It’s just a cabin.”
William Alexander favored him with an encouraging smile. “We’d like to picture the scene as you tell your story, sir. Where the furniture was, and so on.”
Jack Collis gave the prosecutor a doubtful look, but after a moment’s thought, he obliged. “It’s an ordinary cabin. Made of chestnut logs, caulked with lime. Fifty paces long, twenty paces wide. Door in the center, front and back, and one little square window next to the fireplace. Puncheon floors. Bed in the corner between the fireplace and the door. Baby’s cradle at the bedside. Table and benches-middle of the room. Oak chest against the back wall.”
I tried to picture the little house. Surely in its entirety it could have fit into Squire Erwin’s parlor at Belvidere; yet I knew that families with eight or ten children lived in similar dwellings, not only in the mountain wilderness but among the humbler folk in Morganton. I glanced at Mrs. Silver to see what her reaction was to hearing her meager possessions thus outlined before a room full of strangers, but she remained impassive.
“It was clean,” said Jack Collis, noticing perhaps the faint distaste in Mr. Alexander’s expression.
“So you went into this one-room abode to look around, sir. And what did you find?”
“Well, I couldn’t see much to begin with. The fire was out. It was almighty dark in there. And cold. I went over to the fireplace to see about starting a fire, so’s I could see better, and when I knelt down it struck me that there was too much ash in the fireplace.”
“Could you tell us what you deduced from that?” I suspected that the prosecutor’s bewilderment was not entirely feigned. William Alexander had never cleaned out a fireplace in his life.
“Somebody had burned up a lot of wood without cleaning out the fireplace. Seemed like a lot of logs had been burned in a hurry, and I wondered how come, so I commenced to sifting through the ashes.”
“What did you find?”
Jack Collis told how he lit a new fire to heat the water in the kettle, and how the grease bubbles told him that flesh had been burned upon the logs, which prompted him to make a more careful search of the cabin.
“Once the room warmed up, the smell told me something was wrong.”
“What smell, Mr. Collis?”
“The smell of butchering,” Jack Collis said, scowling at the memory. The courtroom shuddered with him.
“What did you do then, sir?”
“I went and found Jacob Hutchins with the search party, and took him back to the cabin. He helped me take up a plank of the puncheon floor next to the fireplace.”
“And what did you find, sir?”
“Blood. A dried-up puddle of blood in the dirt underneath that plank.”
William Alexander smiled indulgently. “A rabbit, perhaps, or a deer?”
“You butcher animals outdoors.”
Several of the jurors were nodding in agreement. Most of them had hunted in the deep forests of Burke County at some time in their lives, and they knew the truth of Jack Collis’s words. William Alexander looked pleased with himself as he nodded to Nicholas Woodfin and returned to his seat. “Your witness.”
I was watching the defendant. She sat perfectly still, staring past the jury as if she were so deep in prayer or meditation that the words did not reach her. I fancied, though, that I saw her wince when Jack Collis spoke of butchering.
When Nicholas Woodfin stood up to question the old man, Mrs. Silver’s blank stare wavered, and for a moment she regarded her lawyer with shining eyes, but the look was gone in an instant, and she resumed her pose of indifference to the proceedings around her.
I wondered what Mr. Woodfin would make of this witness. The legal strategy would be to discredit Jack Collis, if he could, by questioning the old man’s eyesight or establishing Collis’s close ties to the Silver family and his animosity toward the young widow. I would have hesitated to take such a course of action, though, for I had seen what a forthright fellow the witness was, and I thought that he had won the respect-and therefore the trust-of that simple jury. They would view with disfavor any attempt by a town lawyer to impugn this man’s testimony.
Woodfin must have felt as I did, for after one or two perfunctory questions concerning the circumstantial nature of the grisly discovery, he dismissed the old woodsman with grave courtesy.
I looked about the courtroom for familiar faces. Charlie Silver’s family was represented by his uncle Mr. Greenberry Silver, himself a prominent landowner in the western reaches of Burke County. One of the constables had mentioned that Charlie’s stepmother had a new baby, born only a few weeks ago, and I surmised that either Jacob Silver had chosen to be with his wife, or else he had not cared to venture down from the hills to hear the particulars of his son’s murder detailed before uncaring strangers. Other Silver relatives waited in the hallway for their own turn as witnesses.