Chapter XXI: That Sweet Boon--Trial by Jury

On the day that Dorn Hackett's trial commenced, the little court-house of Sag Harbor was by no means large enough to contain half the people who came from all the country around to attend it. From the neighborhood in which the murder had been committed, they seemed to have come in a body. Old acquaintances, neighbors, friends of the prisoner--who had known him since he was a child; who had heard as fresh the news that his father, William Hackett, had been swept overboard from a whaler's yard-arm and lost in a gale, and who had seen the drowned man's little orphan boy grow up to young manhood among them--were present by dozens; yet among them all one could hardly hear a few faint expressions of sympathy for him, or hope for the demonstration of his innocence. There is nothing for which ignorant people, particularly rustics, are so ready as the acceptance of the guilt of a person accused legally of a crime; nothing they resent so deeply as what they believe to be an attempt to deceive them by a false assumption of innocence. The discovery of the marked handkerchief in his possession, had been, to their narrow minds, conclusive evidence of Dorn's guilt and each man of them felt it an insult to what he deemed his intelligence, that Dorn had, just before that discovery, betrayed him into a temporary fear that they might not have the right man after all.

Deacon Harkins, who, by the way, had tried to have Dorn, as a child, indentured to him by the county overseer of the poor, as soon as he heard of the drowning of the lad's father--a slavery from which the boy was saved by the kindness of a good old man, long since dead--was prominent in the crowd about the court-house, quoting texts and vaunting the foresight with which he had "always looked forward to seeing that young man come to a bad end." Aunt Thatcher, was of course, present, and--as might have been expected--vindictively exultant. Mary Wallace, having been summoned as a witness by the prosecution, was compelled to attend, and made her way through the throng to the county clerk's office, beneath the court-room, where she was given a seat to wait until she should be called. Happily there was still humanity enough among the rough people who were eagerly awaiting the conviction of her lover, to prompt some little sympathetic feeling for her; and, as she went by, they at least refrained from saying, in her hearing, that they hoped Dorn Hackett would be hanged. Aunt Thatcher was incapable of such delicacy and reserve. She had been saying that daily, and almost hourly, since she had heard of his arrest, and she continued to say it now, loudly too, until the disgusted county clerk ordered her to keep quiet or get out of his office, to which she had forced her way with Mary.

There was little difficulty in getting a jury, for in those days fewer newspapers were read than now are; fewer people sought to escape jury duty by deliberately "forming and expressing opinions relative to the guilt or innocence of the accused" in advance of the trial; and, above all, lawyers had not yet developed, as they since have, the science of delay at that point of the proceedings. Twelve "good men and true" were selected--perhaps a sample dozen as juries go. One of them heard with great difficulty; two kept yawning and dropping asleep from time to time; a fourth belied his looks, if he was not at least semi-idiotic; three were manifestly weak, simple-minded persons, devoid of moral force and easy to be influenced by a stronger will, and the remaining five were evidently men who doubtless meant to do right, but were obstinate to the verge of pig-headedness, and showed, by the countenances with which they regarded the prisoner, that they were already inimical to him. And before this "jury of his peers" Dorn Hackett stood, to be tried for his life.

It would be time and space lost to recite the thrilling opening speech of the prosecuting attorney; to tell how vividly he depicted the horrors of the crime that had been perpetrated; how artfully he seemed, by word and gesture, to connect the prisoner with the crime at every stage of its progress; how scornfully he dwelt upon "the absurd story by which the murderer had sought to explain away the damning proofs against him, and which his counsel might have the audacity to ask this intelligent jury to believe," etc. It was more like a closing than an opening speech, and when it was ended, five of the jury looked as if they were satisfied that the proper thing to do would be to take the prisoner right out and hang him to one of the big elms beside the court-house.

Mr. Dunn's heart sank within him. What had he to make headway with against that speech, before those five men and with that fatal marked handkerchief ever fluttering before his eyes?

The hearing of the witnesses for the State continued slowly all the first day. All that had been sworn to before the committing magistrate, was repeated now, and there was really very little more, but that little was adroitly handled, and the temper of the jury was to make the most of it. Peter Van Deust produced a great effect when he gave his testimony as to the identification of the handkerchief belonging to his murdered brother, which was, in the language of the prosecutor, cunningly woven into questions "voluntarily, confidently, and impudently exhibited by the prisoner to sustain his preposterous story." Poor Mary Wallace had to go on the stand and testify that Dorn had been with her, walking and conversing, in the edge of the woods, less than half a mile from the Van Deust homestead, on the night of the murder, and that he left her about nine o'clock. Witnesses were brought from New Haven to testify to Dorn's arrival in that city, the morning after the murder, with his clothes bloody, head cut, and one ankle sprained; and to his admissions that he had received those injuries while running through the woods on Long Island the night before.

"Not," exclaimed the prosecuting-attorney, "as he would have it believed, long before the murder, but when he was fleeing red-handed, conscious that the brand of Cain was on his brow!"

The prisoner's counsel protested against this sort of interpolation of comments, as irregular and unfair, and the court sustained him in that view, but the majority of the jury looked as if they would have thanked the prosecutor for expressing their sentiments so forcibly.

Then other witnesses were called to prove, as experts, that a man would have time after the hour at which it was believed the murder was committed,--say, at midnight--to run to the Napeague Inlet, take a sail-boat and reach New Haven early the next morning. One, indeed, testified that he had tried and accomplished the feat.

And that was all the State had to offer. Still, the popular feeling was that it was sufficient.

"It would hardly amount to much before a city jury," said the prosecuting-attorney, in confidential chat with some other lawyers at the close of the day's proceedings, "but I guess it will be enough down here."

The jury, at the adjournment of the court for the day, gravely heard the injunction of the judge, that they "should refrain from talking to anybody about the case," and then went out and discussed the evidence with their friends and neighbors.

"The handkerchief must hang him; that's clear," said everybody. "How could he have had it if he hadn't killed the old man?"

Dorn was remanded back to the jail, where Mary had a little interview with him, during which she wept almost constantly, and he spent all his time in trying to console her with loving words and foolish hopes, so that neither of them said or did anything particularly reasonable or worthy of the telling here. And then Mary went back to the room that had been assigned her in the tavern, and cried so all night, that in the morning her eyes were red and swollen almost sufficiently to justify in some measure the gratified assurance of Aunt Thatcher, that she "looked like a fright."

As for Lem Pawlett, it must be admitted that he acted in what seemed to his friends a most reprehensible and unaccountable manner. Following even too strictly the injunctions of Mr. Pelatiah Holden about saying nothing to anybody, he would not even give them the satisfaction of knowing positively that he had found his man, and that the much needed evidence would be forthcoming in due time. He did go so far, under Ruth's most severe pressure, as to assure her that it would "be all right," but beyond that the little maiden found that for once her power was set at naught. He felt resting upon him a responsibility that temporarily out-weighted his love, and the gravity of his stubborn silence awed the girl, and made her look upon him with a new respect. But how he suffered! Bearing alone and in silence his weighty secret, made him feel that virtually Dorn's salvation depended upon him, and should anything happen by which that evidence would not be forthcoming, and Dorn be hanged in consequence of its failure, he would be neither more nor less than the executioner of his friend. The next most unhappy man in the town that night, after the prisoner himself, was Lem Pawlett. When, from sheer exhaustion, he fell asleep, nearly at daylight, he had a horrid dream that he was tied hand and foot, and powerless to speak, while his witness was fleeing swiftly away from him on horseback, and that Dorn was standing before him, under the gallows-tree, with a noose about his neck and a horrible look of haunting reproach in his eyes. From that dream he awoke with a howl of fright, and, fearing to go to sleep again, sprang up, dressed himself and hurried out into the deserted main street of the still slumbering town.

He took his way toward the wharf. "Sometimes," he said to himself, "the packet from New York gets in early; hardly so early as this, but then she might have had an extraordinary good breeze last night." His road led him by the jail. He shuddered as he passed the grim, gray building, for never before had it seemed to him so big, so strong, so terrible. Not one living thing did he meet in his lonely walk, and when he reached the wharf the most profound silence surrounded him. The tide was rising, but without the sound of its accustomed swash on the piles. Its influx was indicated only by a slight ripple around the obstacles it met. As far out as he could see the surface of the bay was as smooth as a mirror. Going down some slimy green steps to a boat-landing, he dipped one hand into the water, and held it above his head. There was not even a breath of air moving. With sullen resignation he seated himself upon a pile of lumber and waited.

The dawn appeared, then suddenly the sun rose up behind the town, casting upon the glassy surface of the water before him long shadows of the tall warehouses, and of the people who now began to busy themselves in the vicinity. Not the smallest ripple broke the outlines of those shadows. He looked anxiously up at the sky. Ah! with what joy he would have seen, in the direction of New York, a myriad of those ragged fleecy clouds which sailors call "mare's tails," and believe to be sure harbingers of wind. But there was not one to give him hope. The sky looked like a monster dome of unflecked, burnished brass. It was high tide, and a dead calm.

With a groan he turned away and retraced his steps to the tavern. An unwonted excitement began to be perceptible in the streets, the continuation of that of the preceding day. Already people were flocking in from the country, determined to be nearest the court-room doors when they were thrown open. The tavern bar-room was crowded, even before the sleepy bar-keeper had his eyes well rubbed open, and a sort of general picnic scene was presented by the people breakfasting on cold lunches in the shade of the elms.