Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/111



E, THE JURY, find the defendant, Richard Bland, guilty of murder in the first degree, in manner and form as charged.

Allen Defoe, foreman of the twelve men, listened with impassive face as the judge read away the life of the prisoner in the dock—the man whose death warrant Defoe had signed only a few minutes before. As the judge finished, Defoe glanced warily toward the prisoner. Somehow, he preferred to avoid catching his eye.

Bland, a slight, rather uninteresting type of man, stood with bowed head; Defoe now turned his gaze full upon him.

"Has the prisoner anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced?"

The judge's voice, coming after the short pause sent a strange chill into the heart of Allen Defoe, juror. He hoped the prisoner's counsel would make the customary motions for a new trial or for time in which to file an appeal. He did neither: evidently Bland believed the verdict inescapable—or else he was out of funds.

Now the judge arose in his place, donning with nervous gesture the black cap that accompanies the most tragic moment in the performance of a court's duties. The judge seemed ill at ease in the cap. It was the first time he had worn it. The grotesque thought flitted through Defoe's mind that perhaps the judge had borrowed the cap from one of his fellow jurists for the occasion.

The almost level rays of the western sun diffused a sombre, aureate glow athwart the judge's bench, so that the dark figure of the standing man was in mystic indistinctness beyond the shaft of light from the window. A fly now and then craved the spotlight for a moment and lazily floated from the growing dusk of the room to the avenue of ebbing day, streaming in from the west. And always there was a constant turmoil of dust particles, visible only when they moved into the bright relief of the sun-shaft.

The handful of spectators stirred restlessly while the judge was making his preparations. The droning noises of approaching summer evening in a rural county-seat were smothered by the buzz of ill-hushed voices. Perhaps that was why the judge, in the midst of adjusting his headgear, rapped sharply thrice with his gavel—or, it may have been only his excess of nervousness.

Defoe thought the judge never would stop fumbling with his cap. And finally the judge lost track of the jury's verdict and had to mess through the scattered papers before him until he found it. He didn't really require it to pronounce sentence of death upon the man in the dock. Hunting it, though, delayed the Rh