Only seven were hanged
the door of the room was flung open and the light was switched on.
An elderly man, clad in clerical garb, stood on the threshold.
He saw Connolly and the broken pedestal in one glance.
"Who are you?" he asked, not angrily, but puzzled and annoyed. He
passed his thin fingers through his white hair as he advanced.
"You disturbed me at early study," he said. "What do you want?"
Still Connolly did not answer. The white-haired man was close to him
now. His face was pale, and Connolly saw that his hands were
trembling. The clergyman gazed hard at him.
"You are the murderer!"
Still Connolly did not answer.
"What do you want here?"
This time the fugitive replied, fiercely:
"Food. Drink. Clothes."
"Your name is Connolly?"
"It is."
"I recognized you from the pictures in the newspapers. It was you
the village people chased."
"I want food," cried Connolly.
"I can give you food."
"I want drink."
"I can give you drink."
"I want a place to hide."
"I cannot give you that."
They stared at each other, this desperate, worn-out man who was a
murderer, and the old priest.
"There is no sanctuary here," said the priest in a low tone. "The
days of sanctuary are long past."
Connolly groaned.
"The church can offer you only one thing."
"What?" cried Connolly.
"Repentance!"
Again Connolly groaned.
Suddenly the spark of resentment that flickered in him blazed up.
"I could kill you, too!" he shouted.
"I know. Would that help you in any way?"
Connolly had expected opposition. The admission startled him
strangely. It was as if the words had disarmed him. They left him
more confused than ever.
"Give me," he pleaded, "give me a chance to get away."
"I dare not."
"What?"
"The law forbids it."
Connolly's last hope crashed. He recollected, in a fumbling way,
that he had asked this priest to do something that would bring him
under the lash of the Law--that rigid, unrelaxing force that was on
his own trail, that machine that was mightier than any individual.
The longer he stayed in that house the nearer the Law would creep
until it laid its hand on him. He turned and was halfway out of the
window when he heard the voice of the priest:
"Stay here and you shall have food and drink. It is all I dare give
you. All except my prayers----"
Connolly heard no more. He was racing out toward the highroad.
He crossed the meadows again and reached the river bank. Some
distance ahead he saw a figure seated on the slope. He crept forward
and saw that this man was fishing. By his side was an open basket
and a pile of sandwiches lay on an open handkerchief. Connolly
recognized the figure. The fisher was the man called George.
Connolly was being driven by hunger. He picked up a heavy stick,
part of a fallen branch of a tree, that lay on the open ground. He
crept toward the man.
He was within a few feet of George when he stood up, raising the
stick above his head. But he did not strike. The man turned his
head and looked at him. Connolly dropped the stick and dashed into
the river, wading rapidly to the other side.
He climbed the muddy bank and walked toward the village.
The man called George followed him, but the murderer took no notice.
He reached the village street and strode into the inn. The landlord
behind the bar saw him and shouted:
"It is the murderer! Seize him!"
The murderer made no attempt to escape. The man called George was
behind him and a policeman was coming in at the door. As he came
forward Connolly held out his hands for the handcuffs. When they
were fastened on his wrists he sat down with a strange, savage
satisfaction and looked up at the man called George.
"I could have killed you also," he cried. "But that would never have
given me what I want most."
The man called George nodded sagely.
"I know," he said in a soft tone. "I saw you in the creek yesterday.
I knew you stayed in the wood all day. I know how you felt. I have
been a warder in my day. You murderers are all the same. You are
your own prosecutors. Only yourselves can give you what you want
most."
"What did he want most, George?" asked the landlord. "Why did he
give himself up so easy?"
The answer came from the murderer as he rose to go with the constable.
"The fox is treed!" he cried, wearily. "Can a man fight a nation?
Take me to be hanged! At last I can rest!"
CHAPTER VI
_The Judge States His Third Case_
The waiter rose to his feet and pointed to the fire, which had died
down during his recital.
"Perhaps you would be good enough to put some coal on," he said.
"You will find plenty in the coal box."
The judge, whose chin was resting on the back of his hand, seemed
deep in reflection; but he stirred at the suggestion.
"Are you forgetting yourself? You are the servant here, are you not?"
"Please do not let me insist. If I turned my back to you it is
possible that you would have a temptation to do what Connolly was
tempted to do to the man called George. It would have regrettable
results. But if you do not feel cold----"
The judge put plenty of coal on the fire and returned to his chair.
His manner was austere and distant. The waiter had pushed the
minute-book in front of the judge's chair and was still standing.
Not until the judge resumed his seat did the waiter sit down.
A silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackle of the coal on
the fire. The other members of the Clue Club gave no sign of life.
They sat or reclined in strange attitudes, heaped in their chairs as
dead men.
From the street outside came the sound of singing and music.
Christmas waits were heralding the approach of the new day.
"I promised you," said the waiter, "that I should answer your query
about Abe Lammie's case when I had related the climax of Jeff S.
Connolly's career. I propose to do so right away. First of all, I
take it from what you have said that you belong to that school of
crime students who believe there is such a thing as a 'born
criminal': that, because of certain characteristics, some men and
women are natural lawbreakers."
"I certainly believe that there is a criminal class," declared the
judge, somberly.
"Precisely. You follow the teachings of Lombroso, who compiled
charts to show that these characteristics presented physical traits
such as receding foreheads, heavy jaws, and so on. But you may not
be aware that at a meeting of students of criminal anthropology at
Geneva it was successfully proved that most of the students
themselves were not free from such traits. In a word, one has only
to observe some of our most respected and most blameless leaders in
the Church, in the legal or other professions, to see similar traits.
This proves that charts and tables are unreliable guides. You cannot
hang a man for his facial expression. Come, do not you see in me
some of the facial traits that you yourself possess?"
The judge cast a melancholy look on the waiter but did not answer.
He regarded the comparison as excessively impudent.
"If you will not admit what I suggest, then I must be content with my
own belief. And you are a judge of the Criminal Court, while I am
one who has stood in the dock. Luckily for you, our positions are
not reversed!"
The waiter was becoming positively insulting. The judge remained
silent. But he was thinking of how he would deal with this man when
he came up for judgment!
"Opposed to the theory of Lombroso," went on the waiter, "is the
classical school of thought founded, I think, by Beccaria, who held
that, though every man had free will, the same punishment would not
be just if applied to every case. This meant that while the crimes
might be the same, the responsibility was not. These conflicting
theories, I fancy, were the cause of the founding of the American
Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. The city of Chicago,
perhaps appropriately, was the cradle of this organization.
"One result of this classification of crime and its causes has been
the inevitable classification of offenses. This has led to confusion
indeed. A man may be executed for being accessory to killing another
person, but he cannot be hanged for attempting to commit suicide.
Cornering the food supplies of a nation so that people die is not
illegal; but if a clergyman defies the rubric and substitutes his own
form of service, he may be haled before a judge and jury, and
severely punished. At one time it was a grave offense to refuse to
listen to a sermon on Sunday. At the present time emigration is
encouraged by governments where formerly it was illegal. Even now
there is no clear distinction between a felony and a misdemeanor,
except the vague understanding that the one is a more serious offense
than the other."
"Are you reading _me_ a lesson on law?" interposed the judge,
sarcastically.
"I am merely pointing to the confusion that exists in the penal code.
This confusion exists to a fearful extent in the matter of judgment
of death. You know as well as anybody that cases of depravity from
the East End of cities are dealt with much more harshly than
depravity that comes from the West End. Please do not deny it.
There is plenty of proof. But to return to the cases of Lammie and
Connolly. The root fact of these two murders, committed by these two
men, is that they had their origin in conditions that punishment can
never cure."
"You mean that the law can never cure such criminals?" demanded the
judge.
"Judgment of death can only obliterate the offenders."
"That is all the law desires to do, for the plain reason that society
must be protected. These executions act as deterrents."
"Have you stopped murder since the days of Cain? And yet----"
"You have the wrong end of the argument, my friend. The judgment of
death is not only a deterrent; it is necessary for the reason that
the law considers the lives of its citizens to be sacred----"
The judge could not continue, owing to the guffaw of derisive
laughter with which the waiter interrupted his speech.
"What a legal mind you have, to be sure!" cried the waiter,
scornfully. "Why, your law of judgment of death, while it pretends
to regard life as sacred, violates its pretense by destroying life!"
The judge made a gesture of dissent, but the Waiter pursued his
attack.
"In the case of Abe Lammie, The Mole," he shouted in his earnestness,
"society was as much to blame as he. It started him off with every
encouragement to develop the very traits in his mental make-up that
you declare are criminal traits. _Yet you have the audacity to take
his life for being what you expected him to be!_ Is that logical, I
ask you?"
"Every man has free will----"
"For a judge you do not show any marked clarity of thought, my lord.
You apparently want to stand with a foot in the camp of Lombroso and
a foot in the camp of Beccaria. It will not do. I cannot allow such
loose thinking. And I am the judge in this room. What is your
defense? Do you found it on Lombroso's teachings or on the school of
Beccaria? I am waiting."
The judge shifted his position and bit his lip. It was all
intolerable; but what could he do? He became irritable.
"I am not here to be cross-examined, or even examined, sir. I am
here----"
The waiter's long fingers gripped the handle of the bludgeon used by
the barbarian Kartarus.
The judge faltered, coughed, and resumed.
"I am here to conduct my own case as I think fit. We are engaged on
a discussion, each giving proof and support to his words by
quotations from this minute-book. I say that every man has free will
and must abide the result and consequence of his actions."
"Then I take it that you agree with Beccaria. But he argued for