XVII
At six o’clock on the evening of the day the State rested, Marriott found himself once more at the jail. He passed the series of grated cells from which their inmates peered with the wistful look common to prisoners, and paused before Archie’s door. He could see only the boy’s muscular back bowed over the tiny table, slowly dipping chunks of bread into his pan of molasses, eating his supper silently and humbly. The figure was intensely pathetic to Marriott. He gazed a moment in the regret with which one gazes on the dead, struck down in an instant by some useless accident. “And yet,” he thought, “it is not done, there is still hope. He must be saved!”
“Hello, Archie!” he said, forcing a cheerful tone.
Archie started, pushed back his chair, drew his hand across his mouth to wipe away the crumbs, and thrust it through the bars.
“Don’t let me keep you from your supper,” said Marriott.
Archie smiled a wan smile.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It isn’t much of a supper, and I ain’t exactly hungry.”
Archie grasped the bars above his head and leaned his breast against the door.
“Well, what do you think of it, Mr. Marriott?”
“I don’t know, Archie.”
“Looks as if I was the fall guy all right.”
Marriott bit his lip.
“We have to put in our evidence in the morning, you know.”
“Yes.”
“And we must decide whether you’re going on the stand or not.”
“I’ll leave it to you, Mr. Marriott.”
Marriott thought a moment.
“What do you think about it?” he asked presently.
“I don’t know. You see, I’ve got a record.”
“Yes, but they already know you’ve been in prison.”
“Sure, but my taking the stand would make the rap harder. That fellow Eades would tear me to pieces.”
Marriott was silent.
“And then that old hixer on the jury, that wise guy up there in the corner.” Archie shook his head in despair. “Every time he pikes me off, I know he’s ready to hand it all to me.”
“You mean Broadwell?”
“Yes. He’s one of those church-members. That’s a bad sign, a bad sign.” Archie shook his head sadly. “No, it’s a kangaroo all right, they’re going to job me.” Archie hung his head. “Of course, Mr. Marriott, I know you’ve done your best. You’re the only friend I got, and I wish—I wish there was some way for me to pay you. I can’t promise you, like some of these guys, that I’ll work and pay you when I get—” He looked up with a sadly humorous and appreciative smile. “Of course, I—”
“Don’t, Archie!” said Marriott. “Don’t talk that way. That part of it’s all right. Cheer up, my boy, cheer up!” Marriott was trying so hard to cheer up himself. “We haven’t played our hand yet; we’ll give ’em a fight. There are higher courts, and there’s always the governor.”
Archie shook his head.
“Maybe you won’t believe me, Mr. Marriott, but I’d rather go to the chair than take life down there. You don’t know what that place is, Mr. Marriott.”
“No,” said Marriott, “but I can imagine.”
Then he changed his tone.
“We’ve plenty of time to talk about all that,” he went on. “Now we must talk about to-morrow. Look here, Archie. Why can’t you go on the stand and tell your whole story—just as you’ve told it to me a hundred times? It convinced me the first time I heard it; maybe it would convince the jury. They’d see that you had cause to kill Kouka!”
“Cause!” exclaimed the boy. “Great God! After the way he hounded me—I should say so! Why, Mr. Marriott, he made me do it, he made me what I am. Don’t you see that?”
“Of course I do. And why can’t you tell them so?” Marriott was enthusiastic with his new hope.
“Oh, well,” said Archie with no enthusiasm at all, “with you it’s different. You look at things different; you can see things; you know there’s some good in me, don’t you?”
It was an appeal that touched Marriott, and yet he felt powerless to make the boy see how deeply it touched him.
“And then,” Archie went on—he talked with an intense earnestness and he leaned so close that Marriott could smell the odor of coffee on his breath—“when I talk to you, I know somehow that—well—you believe me, and we’re sitting down, just talking together with no one else around. But there in that court-room, with all those people ready to tear my heart out and eat it, and the beak—Glassford, I mean—and the blokes in the box, and Eades ready to twist everything I say; well, what show have I got? You can see for yourself, Mr. Marriott.”
Archie spread his hands wide to show the hopelessness of it all.
“Well, I think you’d better try, anyhow. Will you think it over?”