The Road to Nowhere by Maurice Walsh

Author:Maurice Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, Ireland
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1935-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III

I

THE court-house of Castleinch was crowded next morning. Men of the road, showmen, tinkers and their shawled women-folk were there in full strength; a few farmers and horse-dealers too, who had stayed overnight in town; all the others were citizens keenly interested in the conclusion of the drama. Uniformed civic guards kept the doors, lounged here and there in the aisle, stood to attention below and behind the prisoners’ dock. Up on the raised Bench the District Justice sat in his black robes, white bands and scrap of grey wig: a youngish man with a resolute jut of chin and a humorous mouth. Directly below him sat his clerk in front of the low oblong witness-table; and at either side of this table the legal profession lolled carelessly on leather-backed forms. Outside the railings of the sacred precincts the public were packed in a slope that went up and back to the oaken ceiling.

Behind the railing of the square prisoners’ dock stood Shamus Og Coffey and Rogue McCoy. Shamus Og was his own tall self, handsome and dare-devil as ever. But Rogue McCoy? A sorry spectacle! A veritable beaten-up tinker! His neck was bare, for the red kerchief had been torn from it; one sleeve of his blarney jacket had been ripped from the shoulder; one eye was half-closed above a dark-blue bruise; there was a patch of sticking-plaster on craggy brow and another above a cheek-bone; his mouth was swollen, his nose was swollen, his chin showed a red blaze below the stubble; his right hand rested gingerly upon the railing of the dock, and was swathed in bandages across knuckles and round thumb. A beaten-up wreck of a man? But no! For the half-shut eye and the other clear grey one were serene, steady, full of peace; and the face, though haggard and weary, was indomitably calm. No madness there any more.

The State, as prosecutor, had finished its side of the case. Its last witness had not been very satisfactory. That witness was Mrs Elspeth Trant. She had admitted that Captain Eudmon Butler was a friend of hers, but denied that he had been commissioned to buy a horse for her; Sir Jerome Trant, as sworn, might have requested his assistance as a well-known judge of horse-flesh, but in the examination of the colt in question she was the only interested party, and Captain Butler had interfered entirely on his own initiative, and had forced—she used that word—a quarrel on the seller without consulting her wishes and against her wishes. The prosecuting lawyer, swearing under his breath, did not press her, and the defending lawyer was wise enough not to seek to heighten the impression she had made.

Elspeth Trant now sat in a reserved seat inside the railings, her face pale, but collected, below a dark veil, and her eyes downcast. She had glanced once at Rogue McCoy, but Rogue McCoy had looked at no one.

The first and only witness for the defence was up. And he was Jamesy Coffey, squat, blue-jowled, grim.

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