“There’s been a terrible accident up at the Boyer home,” said the secretary. “The old man has been hurt... Well no, I couldn’t make out how. They’re sure awful excited up at the home. Perhaps you’d better go there.”
Accident... terrible... awful excitement — these were the words which kept ringing in Kremp’s ears as he hurried up to the Boyer home. But why had only the old gentleman been hurt? Had he gone into the music room alone?...
Kremp was admitted by the chambermaid. That young lady was still in the grip of her excitement. She led him to the reception room door and then, stating somewhat abruptly, that she would inform Mr. Boyer that he had come, turned and ran upstairs.
Now, from the hall it was apparent that the music room was not a wreck. This was puzzling. Still, something was not in order. That was clear from the maid’s actions.
Kremp went into the reception room. He was too preoccupied to notice that the windows were open and that the room was quite cold. He stood leaning against the center table. After a few moments he absently laid his lighted cigar into a brass ash tray.
Just how much nonsense do you expect nitroglycerine to stand for? It had been scratched, scraped, tossed about carelessly and stepped on. Now the hot end of a cigar was being applied to it. Can you blame it for raising a splutter?
It was a terrible mess for Mrs. Nolan to clean up.
V
“It was a most peculiar case,” Mr. Boyer will tell you. “The reception room was blown right out of the house and yet the most careful investigation could not disclose the original cause. It seems cruel to say so, but it would appear that Mr. Kremp’s torrid temperament, which was long suppressed, suddenly exploded from spontaneous combustion. He used to have a sulphurous disposition, that gentleman. He was, you might say, an explosive fellow.”
The Weight of a Feather
by Carl Clausen
I
The state had completed its case. The conviction of the prisoner seemed certain, in spite of the fact that the evidence was purely circumstantial.
The attorney for the State was gathering up his papers at his table, upon which, facing the jury, stood a massive bronze bust of Beethoven, the composer. Beside the bust lay a cowboy’s lariat. Nothing else.
The attorney was a square-jawed, deep-chested man with cold blue eyes set much too wide apart and a bristling gray pompadour brushed back from his massive, corrugated forehead.
He had handled the case well. It had been a difficult one. The method alleged to have been used by the murderer savored of dime novels. The appearance of the prisoner, too, had been hard to overcome.
The attorney admitted grudgingly as he let his cold, hard eyes rest for the fraction of a moment upon the boy sitting erect on the bench beside the girl, with his head thrown back, that it was hard to believe him guilty of a cunning, brutal murder, and harder to convince a jury that he had committed it.
The lad raised his eyes for an instant to the face of his accuser, just then, but there was no. look of malice in them. He seemed merely to be endeavoring to fathom the reason for the vindictiveness that had just been directed against himself by this man whom he had known since boyhood.
He was not the conventional, beetle-browed murder suspect. Indeed, he was the one person in the crowded court-room who seemed out of place there. He was a little above average height — the dark head of the girl seated on the bench beside him came just above his shoulders-and slender; not slight, but slender with the vigorous slenderness of youth. His eyes were blue, large and very clear, and his hair was crisp, and sandy from habitual exposure to the elements.
It was early afternoon. A hush lay over the crowded court-room following the closing announcement of the attorney for the State. It was the courtroom of a small Western city at the foot of the snow-clad Sierra-Nevadas. A ray of the wan winter sun entering through the grimy window lay upon the judge’s silvery hair. The judge raised his watery eyes and glanced out at the snow-covered court house square where a gang of men with shovels were making a path for himself and his court to walk home upon. It had been snowing steadily all morning.
During the pause in the proceedings the constable left his post at the door to replenish the fire in the stove. He was a young man and big, a typical Western small town constable, broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced. His uniform was painfully new. He moved with clumsy momentousness on tiptoe across the floor, opened the door of the stove and placed two pine knots upon the bright embers with slow deliberation, as if to invest this simple act with some of the importance he felt.
Then he closed the door of the stove, softly, and started back on tiptoe to his post. As he passed the table of the defendant’s counsel, the lawyer looked up and said to him:
“Take the stand, Ed, please.”
The constable glanced at the prosecuting attorney as if for permission. Then he mounted the steps of the witness box, slowly, and upon being sworn in by the clerk, sat down. For several minutes he remained in his seat without movement, his elbows on the arm of the chair and his stubbled chin resting in the hollow of his great, hairy paw, waiting for the attorney for the defense to begin.
All eyes were turned upon the prisoner’s counsel, seated at his table near the accused and the girl, slightly in advance of them.
The attorney was a heavy, ponderous-looking man. His face, the color of putty, was full and shaven smoothly. His eyes were large and china blue, and his coarse hair lay plastered, untidily, about his temples.
His garments were obtrusively comfortable. His coat fitted him like a sack hung over a gate-post and his trousers bagged, scandalously, at the knees.
The short, stubby fingers of his right hand rested on the edge of the table. His attitude was serene and unruffled. He did not seem in the least disconcerted with the task before him — the task of discrediting the avalanche of circumstantial evidence that had piled itself upon his client.
He sat relaxed in his chair looking at the constable on the witness stand as if he were bored at the task of having to cross-examine him. He seemed in no hurry to proceed, but at the impatient movement of the judge, he finally said in a soft, lazy drawclass="underline"
“I’m going to ask you to re-construct the crime as you think it was committed, Ed.”
The witness blinked his eyes. He glanced, inquiringly, at the prosecuting attorney upon whose face a sneer of contempt rode. The attorney nodded, reassuringly.
Arising, counsel for the defense crossed to his opponent’s table and took from it the cowboy’s lariat and the bronze bust of Beethoven.
“With your permission,” he drawled, blandly, to the prosecutor.
Walking to the witness-box, he placed bust and lariat on the broad railing before the officer.
Then he returned to his seat at the table.
“Now, then, Ed, show us how you think it was done,” he said.
II
The witness ran his heavy fingers through his hair with a helpless sort of motion. He was painfully flustered, but pulling himself together, he rose, picked up the lariat and uncoiled it.
“Well, it was something like this, I think,” he began vaguely.
His embarrassment was painful. With a twist of his wrist he threw the noose of the lariat over the head of the bronze bust, and pulled the noose tight.
“The window of his room,” he said with a jerk of his head at the prisoner, “is twenty feet from the ground directly above the spot where I found his uncle’s body. I figured that he dropped this bust on the old man’s head from the window, then pulled the bust up with the lariat — afterwards — like this.”