In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [121]
foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds - and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square. The crowd started forming at four o'clock, the hour that the county attorney had given as the probable arrival rime of Hickock and Smith. Since the announcement of Hickock's confession on Sunday evening, newsmen of every style had assembled in Garden City: representatives of the major wire services, photographers, newsreel and television cameramen, reporters from Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and, of course, all the principal Kansas papers - twenty or twenty-five men altogether. Many of them had been waiting three days without much to do except interview the service-station attendant James Spor, who, after seeing published photographs of the accused killers, had identified them as customers to whom he'd sold three dollars and six cents worth of gas the night of the Holcomb tragedy. It was the return of Hickock and Smith that these professional spectators were on hand to record, and Captain Gerald Murray, of the Highway Patrol, had reserved for them ample space on the sidewalk fronting the courthouse steps - the steps the prisoners must mount on their way to the county jail, an institution that occupies the top floor of the four-story limestone structure. One reporter, Richard Parr, of the Kansas City Star, had obtained a copy of Monday's Las Vegas Sun. The paper's headline raised grounds of laughter: fear lynch mob awaiting return or; killer suspects. Captain Murray remarked, "Don't look much like a necktie party to me." Indeed, the congregation in the square might have been expecting a parade, or attending a political rally. High-school students, among them former classmates of Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, chanted cheerleader rhymes, bubbled bubble gum, gobbled hotdogs and soda pop. Mothers soothed wailing babies. Men strolled about with young children perched on their shoulders. The Boy Scouts were present - an entire troop. And the middle-aged membership of a women's bridge club arrived en masse. Mr. J. P. (Jap) Adams, head of the local Veterans Commission office, appeared, attired in a tweed garment so oddly tailored that a friend yelled, "Hey, Jap! What ya doin' wearin' ladies' clothes?" - for Mr. Adams, in his haste to reach the scene, had unwittingly donned his secretary's coat. A roving radio reporter interviewed sundry other townsfolk, asking them what, in their opinion, the proper retribution would be for "the doers of such a dastardly deed," and while most of his subjects said gosh or gee whiz, one student replied, "I think they ought to be locked in the same cell for the rest of their lives. Never allowed any visitors. Just sit there staring at each other till the day they die." And a tough, strutty little man said, "I believe in capital punishment. It's like the Bible says - an eye for an eye. And even so we're two pair short!" As long as the sun lasted, the day had been dry and warm - October weather in January. But when the sun descended, when the shadows of the square's giant shade trees met and combined, the coldness as well as darkness numbed the crowd. Numbed and pruned it; by six o'clock, fewer than three hundred persons remained. Newsmen, cursing the undue delay, stamped their feet and slapped frozen ears with ungloved, freezing hands. Suddenly, a murmuring arose on the south side of the square. The cars were coming. Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrol-men, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed