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About The Oregon daily journal. (Portland, Or.) 1902-1972 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 21, 1919)
.'THE OREGON '-SUNDAY' JOURNAt;' PORTTxAND, SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER ; 211919. Bu iHIS is a writ of habeas corpus," began Mr. Crooksbanks, pro nouncing the words with professional rel ish,, "to inquire into the sanity of one John Dixon." The judge slightly inclined his head, examined the papers handed him by the clerk, and glanced casually at the prisoner, whose lack-lustre eyes roved vacantly and whose ill-fitting garments hung loosely about his emaciated figure. "Part Two" of the Supreme Court was phraseology of ftfe document charging the through its buslpess for the day, except defendant in the old-time legal verbiage an indictment, yellow with age and be spattered with Inks of many colors. "Homicide of- the degree of murder, first degree. (Sec, 183 Penal Code.) "The People vs. John Dixon. Filed 3rd day of October, 1884. Pleads not guilty. "Counsel, Stephen O'Reilly. Peter B. Smith, District Attorney. A true bill Edward Norton, Foreman. Oct. 22, 1884. "Jury find defendant insane. Sent to Hudson River State Hospital at Pough keepsie. "N. Y. Supreme Court." The assistant glanced through the quaint for this writ of Crookshanks's ftbe little lawyer always made it a point to turn up at the end of the calendar), and the only other figures in the room were those of Dockbridge, the young assistant district attorney; the keeper from Matteawan and a pale young woman who sat in a far corner. . . "Well, well, Mr. Crookshanks, be as brief as you can," remarked his honor, leaning back resignedly; "I am always brief," returned the lawyer with gravity. "The case is simply this: Twenty years ago my client, Mr. Dixon, was indicted by the Grand Jury for murder in the first degree. He was to have been prosecuted by my honored father, then an assistant district attorney, and defended (here Crookshanks coughed slightly) by the scrupulous Mr. Stephen O'Reilly. But the unexpected happened as usual and on-the day set for his trial the prisoner suddenly became insane. Thereupon a good-natured Jury promptly adjudged him Incapable of understanding the proceed ings or making a defense, and he was im mediately clapped into the State asylum. Remember, this was twenty years ago, your honor. To-day, willy-nilly, he would have been most incontinently hanged. ' "I -Inherited, fortunately or unfortu nately, whichever the court may consider, Mr. Stephen O'Reilly's law practice, and the other day, rummaging among his pa pers, I chanced upon some memoranda which led me to visit the defendant at his place of confinement. I found, much as I had expected, that time had ameliorated his condition and that he had regained his strength of mind. I therefore exhumed him. My young friend," nodding toward tho assistant, "agrees with me that Mr. Dixon is now entirely Bane and should be tried for his offense." "Ought to be, but can't as Mr. Crook shanks knows exceedingly well," interpo lated Dockbridge with sarcasm. "Why not?" inquired the court. "The evidence against him has suc cumbed to age," replied the prosecutor. "He's sane, all right. We don't oppose the writ. He's sound as a drum." "Then this is an 'amicable proceeding'?" continued the Judge. "It could not be more so," murmured Crookshanks. "Of course, there's no opposition," re turned Dockbridge. "Your honor will have to let him go and remand him to the Tombs pending trial!" "Stand up, Mr. Dixon," directed his honor. The prisoner rose heavily to his feet. "What was the particular form of your affliction?" "Voices, your honor, I heard voices voices and bells rlngin' all the time," he hesitated. "But I don't hear 'em now! I can't hear 'em now! I heard 'em for twenty years," he added, unemotionally. 'Appears to be sane enough, don't he, your honor?" inquired his counsel. "I think he is quite as sane as you are, Mr. Crookshanks," answered the court, dryly. "That is ambiguous," returned the lawyer. The judge scribbled something on the back of the writ. "Defendant discharged," said he, briefly, . blotting the order. The keeper arose and snapped a handcuff across the prisoner's wrist. Crookshanks shuffled his papery together, bowed to the court and congratu lated his client. "Everything's all right now," he chirped, briskly. "You'll be out in a week!" The girl slipped forward and tucked the prisoner's arm through her own. "Come on, father," she whispered, en couragingly, and the strange group strag gled slowly out. "Queer case, isn't it?" remarked Dock bridge to the judge. "Not -a shred of evi dence left against him. Of course, we'll have to turn him out. He's had an awful dose of it punishment enough for any man. Think of it twenty years!" "It's a Ion? time," acquiesced his honor, gazing thoughtfully out of the window toward Broadway. "I wonder how the devil Crookshanks happened to remember the chap was still in the asylum and why he didn't try to get him out before." "Possibly waiting for the daughter to grow up and earn the fee," suggested the assistant. "Crookshanks is a wonderful man. There isn't any fish too small for his net. Good-night, sir." "Oyez, oyez!" cried the officer. "This court stands adjourned until to-morrow morning at 10 o'clock." "Good-night. Mr. Dockbridge," said the judge. "I quite agree with you about Crookshanks," II. Dockbridge sat in"hl3 office smoking a bad cigar and reading with interest with mortally wounding one Edward Tyng with a pistol, which he "did shoot off and discharge, with the leaden bullet afore said, In and upon the heart of Tyng afore said," of which he, "the said Tyng, did for a long time languish and langui3hlngly did die." "Paid by the word!" grunted Dockbridge. "Paid by the word, by George! Wish I was paid by the word!" And he wondered how long "the said Tyng would have languished if the or iginal dratighters of indictments had been reimbursed in some other fashion. Inside the indict ment a "Trial Brief" furnished the neces s a r y information which he sought. It had been compiled by Murcheson, a fiery prosecutor now long, since dead, a contemporary of the assistant's father. "It appears," ran the . brief, in its crabbed penmanship, "that Dixon was em ployed by the de ceased as a typeset ter. On the after noon of September 27. 1884, the two had a quarrel in regard to some night work. The assistant fore man, Washburn, was present at the time. The deceased be came incensed and struck Dixon with his open hand. The latter stepped back, and exclaiming, 'No man has ever struck me before, and you will never live to do it again,' pulled a pistol from his poc ket and fired, the bullet entering the employer's right breast and passing transversely across the body. Tyng relr and expired almost Instantly. Dixon handed the pistol to Washburn, . saying, calmly, 'Here take the gun WTash ' " 'Why did you do it. Bill?' asked Wash "Bloodthirsty old brute!" he muttered. . He relit his cigar and pondered oyer the pile of manuscript lying on the desk be fore him. How quickly time flew! And how men had a way of dying! Tyng first well, count him out! There was Smith, the district attorney! Norton, the foreman of the Grand Jury; old Murcheson, gone long before his quarry; the coroner, the policeman, and, yes, Washburn, too, the only witness, was dead. He examined the date carefully. And all this time the de fendant had slumbered peacefully, first at Poughkeepsie and then at Matteawan, bob bing up in a new generation on a habeas corpus. Lucky for him he hadn't slum bered there forever. This insanity business had evidently been just as big a nuisance in the time of the forefathers as It was now. You never could tell. Voices and bells! "Why, anybody could pretend to hear voices and bells!" thought Dockbridge. "But suppose- he did hear 'em! Wouldn't I have heard 'em if I'd killed a man?" He had often heard the experts talk was. He's been very nice. He says the witnesses are all dead." "Why didn't he let you know that be fore?" "I asked him that and he said he had forgotten all about it until he was lookln over some old papers Mr. O'Reilly had left, and even then he mightn't have done any thing, only he found a slip with something on It that made him think that maybe father perhaps" "Might have gotten well," finished Dock bridge, grimly. "So he offered to get him safely out for two hundred dollars? So kind of him!" "Well," answered the girl, "it seems he wasn't Quite sure about it, so he went up to Matteawan (father had been transferred from Poughkeepsie, you understand) and found that he was all right." . "Humph!" growled the assistant. The girl burst Into tears. "Poor old father," she sobbed. "Twenty years! When we might have been so happy together! And I never knew!" Dockbridge, perceiving that for the mo- crowding forward. He felt again that' sense of sweet possession then snap it was off again! Through the white flashes he tried to catch the pictures, but they blurred one into the other. One flashed whiter than the rest, and in the dark that followed he thought he heard the ding dong tolling of the bell, and his heart al most stopped beating as he saw strange figures crowding, running, gesticulating. Blackness again, and through it he felt the clinging arms of a little child and the hot tears of his wife upon his face. He groaned and tried to clasp them to him, but they slipped away and in place of them, beside an iron door, stood O'Reilly's "runner." Yes, there he was, fat, pudgy, suggestive of a gorged and lazy spider. He slapped Dixon on the back and spat dexterously through a slit of a window. How distinct his voice sounded! "No lawyer? 'What! Why, O'Reilly would have him out in a week! You could al ways work 'self-defense.' An eye-witness was there? I'm! That was bad! But there were ways you understand? Given enough money the v Mki4kXfi ' -lld if 111- V lt i If ft Mirm 4:f I.l2J "If All Right Now, Father," She Whispered. "The Judge Is Going to Discharge You and Then We'll Go Right Away Together. , " 'I don't know,' replied Dixon. "Just then the bell of the refectory of the Dominican Fathers began to ring 6 o'clock, so that Washburn can identify the time with exactitude. When Dixon heard the bell he said grimly, 'That's the knell for poor old Tyng and me.' Washburn immediately summoned the police." A note at the bottom of the page read, "I find that the bell was ringing 790'clock not 6. L. Murcheson." Dockbridge grunted again. "Just like old Murcheson to put that in. I'd like to' know what difference it made whether that bell was ringing 6 or 7 or 13!" A loose sheet lying beneath the brief contained only the words in a large scrawl: "Washburn is the only material and im portant witness. No one else was present at the shooting. Subpoena him sure. Can't convict without him." Another hand had written below: "T. W. Washburn is employed at the Mechanical Type Foundry at No. 2190 Head street. He can come at any time." Underneath lay an unfinished letter, be gun by Murcheson to some unknown friend but never finished. "Dear S "You know that I was to try Dixon for murder and had hoped that it would en hance my reputation to a considerable de gree. It was a clear case and he would undoubtedly have been convicted, but what do you suppose has happened? Just as I was about to move the indictment he goes insane! So, of course, I lose my chance and Dixon goes to the asylum in stead of to the scaffold. There is no doubt but that he is really out of his head, but probably he will soon recover sufficient to be tried at least I hope so." Dockbridge crumpled the letter in his fist about the "voice" form of insanity that bete noire of the doctors the last straw of the desperate the only hope of the convicted. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "Twenty years in that den of beasts!" A hesitating tap came at the door. "Oh, come in," snorted the assistant, without get'ting up. The door opened and he saw the Dixon girl. "I beg your pardon," he cried, jumping to his Qet. "I thought it was one of those infernal book agents. Come in. How's your father?" The girl smiled and took the chair he offered. "Father's feelin' well, I reckon, thank you." Dockbridge shifted his cigar. "No sign of anything wrong here, is there?" He tapped hlS forehead. "No, indeed. It's iard to believe there ever was." Dockbridge gave one of his grunts. "How did you come to wait so long to get him out?" "I didn't wait at all," answered the girl. "I thought- he was dead. They all told me so. When mother died I went to the orphanage. Let me seethat was In Octo ber, '84. I was a little child. When I grew up the matron said I had no parents living. I went out West to work on a farm in Minnesota, and I have been there ever since. Two weeks ago I got a letter from the lawyer. He said father was alive and in an asylum and that he would get him out for two hundred dollars. I'd saved up more than that, so I came right on. It turned out that the lawyer had used to know Mr. O'Reilly, father's lawyer that (C) 1319, International Featut Service, Inc. ment she had entirely forgotten the ter rible alternative, did not reply. "Cheer up, cheer up," he said at length. "We'll get him out fast enough and you can be happy together yet." Then he got up and opened the door. "Now, promise not to worry," said he encouragingly, "and I'll dismiss the in dictment to-morrow." III. Dixon stood at the bar of the General Sessions, listening stolidly while Doofc brldge stated the facts of his case to an unsympathetic court. Beside him the fair haired girl, who he tried so hard to realize had been his own little baby, smiled and patted his thin, blue-veined hand as it rested upon the oaken rail. "It's all right now, father," she whis pered. "The judge is going to discharge you and then we'll go right away together. I've got the tickets. Everything is ready." "Yes, yes," he muttered. How like Ann's voice her"s was! His eyes rested vacantly on the soft, white cheek and delicate throat. How like Ann she was herself! A great sob shook his weak frame. Then an icy hand seemed pressing down upon his forehead, the room turned black, and with a click and a whirr the mechanism of his brain flung picture after picture across his vision. The courtroom, the Judge, the offi cers all sank away, and in their place he saw again the little back parlor in which he, John Dixon, journeyman printer, in a black broadcloth suit, was being married. He saw Ann, bis Ann, standing there on the arm of her old father, and smiling with th same sweet smile as of old, and he heard the voice of the clergyman. "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death us do part." Their friends were Great Britain Sight BeserTe& eye-witness might disappear and no questions asked." "Do you want me to have the blood of two men on my head?" gasped Dix on's former self. Nothing of the kind. Of course not. AVhat did Dixon take Mr. O'Reilly for, any way? He wasn't no assassin. He was just the cleverest lawyer in the city, that was all. He could persuade. He succeeded where oth ers failed. He had defended fifty homi cides, and no one yet got "murder in the first." Wasn't that a record ? O'Reilly didn't need no adver tisement. No posters for him. They all flocked to him. You paid your money and you went scot-free. No cure, no pay but the cure was guaran teed. The spider crawled away into the dark ness, and in a clear white flash Dixon saw two men sitting together in a small room with heavily barred windows. One was his old self and the other was the man who had "saved" him. The lawyer re garded his client with satisfaction, for the latter was an ex cellent subject couldn't be better, he said, and his voice seemed like the harsh grating of iron doors. He was the nroud inventor of the "voice" business. Put your hands so. No, the little finger higher. Yes! That was it. Now look up as if you heard something. Good! Now say what was it? Oh, yes. '"Ding-dong! Ding-dong! One, two. three, four!" Splen did! The facts couldn't have been better arranged if O'Reilly had invented them himself. He grasped Dixon's cold hand. His own was soft and sticky. Dixon could feel it yet. It was the last hand he had clasped before he was hurried away to Poughkeepsie. Oh, that O'Reilly had been a great fellow a man of superior intellect real brain. Dixon had clung, to him as to a father miserable shyster though he was. Then Dixon saw again plainly (as the next picture flashed into his poor camera obscura) the looks of pity and compassion of the Jury when he had made his first public essay In his awful role. He had needed no further coaching. Given the words and the gesture, his own jigony of spirit had made the trick convincing be yond question. "We find the prisoner incapable of un derstanding the proceedings against him," the foremanhad repeated. He trembled again as he had trembled the first time he had heard the words. "Saved! Saved!" he had whispered to himself. Under the counsel table O'Reilly had patted his leg, but Dixon had shrunk from him, he could not have told why. Then he heard someone say, "Poor fellow, it's a living death!" Snap crack the pictures came to a stop. Beyond that word "death" every thing was a dull gray, shading off deeper and deeper at the edges Into blackness, and in the middle a red ball that whirled round and round. Suddenly that, too, faded. ' Then the veil was rent and h found himself again. . But his brain was chilled. Everything seemed very far away. He passed his hand trembling across his eyes and saw again Ann's chUC and his . standing at his side. Ho heard with a vague satisfaction someone saying that the witnesses against him were all dead, and that the People had no evidence which would warrant his his being placed on trial for his crime. He had been told this before first by Crook shanks and later by the keeper but he had had his suspicions of both of them. He had sacrificed too much to take any chances at this late day. Even when the lawyer had led him across the pavilion and whispered shafply, when out of earshot of the attendant, "I've looked it all up, Dixon. You're all right. They've no case against you," he had pretended not to understand and muttered unintelligibly. But he had really taken it all in and pondered over it. Afterward, by degrees, he had gradually become persuaded that it waa no trick, but he had never been entirely sure. These lawyers! That O'Reilly! O'Reilly would have sold him out at any time for a hundred dollars! But now he heard It with his own ears. There could be no mistake-no deception, fie was safe! The consummation of his twenty years of suf fering had been reached at last. During all that time his faculties had been con centrated upon the single task of feigning insanity and yet remaining sane. At first it had been easy enough. He had pre tended, just as O'Reilly had directed, to heai voices and bells that was all; and whenever a keeper was by he had put hi8 hand to his ear and repeated the formulai "Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ono-two three four five six seven ! There's the bell! There's the voice! There's an other! Voices! . Voices!" He had varied this and .rung changes in it from time to time, but it had remained .substantially the same. Soon habit had become "ten times nature." The hand would fly up of its own accord; the lips would move automatically. Sometimes he really thought he heard the voices and the bell, but knew what that meant and fought against it. Soon he lost all track of time. Then little Crookshanks had appeared and beckoned him back to life, and ho had waked partially from his dream of death. John Dixon, the indictment against you is dismissed Tor lack of evidence. You are discharged." A look of vacancy stole Into his face and his right hand twitched upward. He forced it down with an effort. "You are discharged you are at lib erty," repeated the clerk, gently. Dixon looked about full of distrust. Dockbridge smiled and nodded good naturedly. "It's all right now, old chap; you can go home with your daughter." Then Dixon grasped the whole truth. He had cheated the gallows, had outwitted this whole sharp orew of judges and law yers.. He Dixon had hoodwinked 'em fooled 'em all, and with the simplest trick in the world. First put your hand to your ear and pretend to hear bella and voices and then wait wait. Presently you were free. That judge thought he was a smart fellow. Well, if he only knew! The humor of the situation began to take hold of Dixon. He would Just like to tell that Judge something. It was too good to keep. He smiled cunningly. He saw Dockbridge step forward snd say something to the judge and heard the judge laugh with a sneer, it seemed to Dixon. He'd take him down a peg he'd make him look like the fool he was, and he laughed himself, a grim laugh his first in twenty years. "Judge." said Dixon, with a childish air. "I'm scot-free, ain't I? You can't touch me, can you?" The Judge nodded, coldly. Then Dixon's manner changed and he leered slyly at the bench. "Suppose I ain't never been Insane at all? Who's the joke on then?" he chuckled and glanced about him with triumph. There was a moment's intense silence In the crowded courtroom at the prisoner's audacity. Again the Judge smiled bit terly. "That depends upon the point of view, Mr. Dixon." he replied, slowly, in a voice low but distinct. "You are aware, I sup pose" Dockbridge knitted his brows and shook his head in the direction of the bench. Dixon was not the flrBt nor will he be the last criminal to feign madness, and always over the feigner hangs the horror that he will be "hoist with his own petard." Dock bridge bad seen the farce played to a ' ghastly end before, and his glance turned with the instinct of protection to the fair haired girl, whose glad look had changed to one of vague alarm. The Judge paid him no attention, nor glanced at the girl; but went mercilessly on. "that the only witness against you died the week after you were committed to the asylum?" The grin on Dixon's face lingered for full half a minute, then faded, and in its place spread a dusky pallor. For a moment he clutched the rail with writhing fingers. Tien the hand flew to his ear. "Voices! Voices!" he whispered, thick ly. "There'B the voice! There's another!" The fire-bell in the corner tower began to boom out Its tocsin. Dixon uttered a hoarse cry? "Ding-dong! Ding-dong! One two three four five six seven. There's the knell for poor old Tyng and me." AS
