Murder -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction
The Chief of Police said something in a lifted voice, the line of
prisoners filed out with one of the policemen, and left the man I had
pointed out alone in front of me. It was then I noticed how his hands
were awkwardly carried in front of him, held by two steel bands around
his wrists, with a chain like a bracelet-chain swinging between. The
sight of it affected me strangely. I had a new bracelet which also had
two bands with a chain between, but they were of gold, and both were
worn on the one hand.
The Chief of Police came and stood beside me, and said, "Look at this
person, Miss Fenwick;" and I had been looking at him all the time, as
if by doing that I could make him understand how terribly I wished I
had never seen him. "Can you take your oath--could you take your oath
in open court that he is the man?"
The Chief's voice sounded solemn, and those words "oath" and "open
court" made me feel frightened. But I saw he held up his hand, palm
out, and mechanically I held up mine. "Yes," I repeated after him, "I
can take my oath in open court." My voice sounded very loud to me, and
clear, and not at all like my own.
There was a pause, and now they were no longer looking at me, but at
the man standing alone in the middle of the room, as if the chain
between his wrists had made him different from them, as if he wasn't a
man at all, but a stone. Yet I couldn't look at him like that. He was
not at all dreadful to look at, only so alone and fiercely proud and
wretched looking that something ached inside of me just to see his face.
Then the Chief of Police nodded at the policeman and said, "That will
do." But before the man could move forward the prisoner had walked
straight up to the rail, and standing there scarcely two feet from me,
in such a low voice that only I could hear, "I am sorry I frightened
you this morning," he said. "If I had known you were passing I should
have managed it differently."
This all happened so quickly that I had hardly seen how dark his eyes
were before father thrust between us, and I heard his voice, sounding
very low, and saying something about infernal impudence and not
presuming to come near me. The policeman touched the dark man's elbow.
He started, half-turned on the man, made a movement with his hands; but
then he felt the jerk of the chain. The blood rushed to his face.
With the policeman holding his arm he walked away across the room, and
I wondered what sort of place he was being taken to. It wasn't until
the door had closed upon him that I realized how angry father was. Mr.
Dingley was saying that prisoners ought not to be permitted to speak
without permission, but the Chief leaned over his desk, smiling at me,
and asked, "What did the prisoner say to you?"
"He apologized for frightening me," I answered.
Still smiling, as if he were coaxing a child, "Exactly what words did
he use, Miss Fenwick?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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