Counsel for the Defense Part 26

"In view of the fact that the defence has already had four months in which to prepare its case," said he, "I shall have to deny the motion and order the trial to proceed."

Katherine sat down. The hope of deferment was gone. There remained only to fight.

A jury was quickly chosen; Katherine felt that her case would stand as good a chance with any one selection of twelve men as with any other.

Kennedy then stepped forward. With an air that was a blend of his pretentious--if rather raw-boned--dignity as a coming statesman, of extreme deference toward Katherine's s.e.x, and of the sense of his personal belittlement in being pitted against such a legal weakling, he outlined to the jury what he expected to prove. After which, he called Mr. Marcy to the stand.

The agent of the filter company gave his evidence with that degree of shame-facedness proper to the man, turned state's witness, who has been an accomplice in the dishonourable proceedings he is relating. It all sounded and looked so true--so very, very true!

When Katherine came to cross-examine him, she gazed at him steadily a moment. She knew that he was lying, and she knew that he knew that she knew he was lying. But he met her gaze with precisely the abashed, guilty air appropriate to his role.

What she considered her greatest chance was now before her. Calling up all her wits, she put to Mr. Marcy questions that held distant, hidden traps. But when she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer--and always elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute stood looking silently at him in baffled exasperation.

"Have you any further questions to ask the witness?" old Judge Kellog prompted her, with a gentle impatience.

For a moment, stung by this witness's defeat of her, she had an impulse to turn about, point her finger at Blake in the audience, and cry out the truth to the court-room and announce what was her real line of defence. But she realized the uproar that would follow if she dared attack Blake without evidence, and she controlled herself.

"That is all, Your Honour," she said.

Mr. Marcy was dismissed. The lean, frock-coated figure of Mr. Kennedy arose.

"Doctor Sherman," he called.

Doctor Sherman seemed to experience some difficulty in making his way up to the witness stand. When he faced about and sat down the difficulty was explained to the crowd. He was plainly a sick man.

Whispers of sympathy ran about the court-room. Every one knew how he had sacrificed a friend to his sense of civic duty, and everyone knew what pain that act must have caused a man with such a high-strung conscience.

With his hands tightly gripping the arms of his chair, his bright and hollow eyes fastened upon the prosecutor, Doctor Sherman began in a low voice to deliver his direct testimony. Katherine listened to him rather mechanically at first, even with a twinge of sympathy for his obvious distress.

But though her attention was centred here in the court-room, her brain was subconsciously ranging swiftly over all the details of the case.

Far down in the depths of her mind the question was faintly suggesting itself, if one witness is a guilty partic.i.p.ant in the plot, then why not possibly the other?--when she saw Doctor Sherman give a quick glance in the direction where she knew sat Harrison Blake. That glance brought the question surging up to the surface of her conscious mind, and she sat bewildered, mentally gasping. She did not see how it could be, she could not understand his motive--but in the sickly face of Doctor Sherman, in his strained manner, she now read guilt.

Thrilling with an unexpected hope, Katherine rose and tried to keep herself before the eyes of Doctor Sherman like an accusing conscience.

But he avoided her gaze, and told his story in every detail just as when Doctor West had been first accused. When Kennedy turned him over for cross-examination, Katherine walked up before him and looked him straight in the eyes a full moment without speaking. He could no longer avoid her gaze. In his eyes she read something that seemed to her like mortal terror.

"Doctor Sherman," she said slowly, clearly, "is there nothing you would like to add to your testimony?"

His words were a long time coming. Katherine's life hung suspended while she waited his answer.

"Nothing," he said.

"There is no fact, no detail, that you may have omitted in your direct testimony, that you now desire to supply?"

"Nothing."

She took a step nearer, bent on him a yet more searching gaze, and put into her voice its all of conscience-stirring power.

"You wish to go on record then, before this court, before this audience, before the G.o.d whom you have appealed to in your oath, as having told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

He averted his eyes and was silent a moment. For that moment Blake, back in the audience, did not breathe. To the crowd it seemed that Doctor Sherman was searching his mind for some possible trivial omission. To Katherine it seemed that he was in the throes of a final struggle.

"You wish thus to go on record?" she solemnly insisted.

He looked back at her.

"I do," he breathed.

She realized now how desperate was this man's determination, how tightly his lips were locked. But she had picked up another thread of this tangled skein, and that made her exult with a new hope. She went spiritedly at the cross-examination of Doctor Sherman, striving to break him down. So sharp, so rigid, so searching were her questions, that there were murmurs in the audience against such treatment of a sincere, high-minded man of G.o.d. But the swiftness and cleverness of her attack availed her nothing. Doctor Sherman, nerved by last evening's talk beside the river, made never a slip.

From the moment she reluctantly discharged him she felt that her chance--her chance for that day, at least--was gone. But she was there to fight to the end, and she put her only witness, her father, upon the stand. His defence, that he was the victim of a misunderstanding, was smiled at by the court-room--and smiled at with apparently good reason, since Kennedy, in antic.i.p.ation of the line of defense, had introduced the check from the Acme Filter Company which Dr. West had turned over to the hospital board, to prove that the donation from the filter company had been in Dr. West's hands at the time he had received the bribe from Mr. Marcy. Dr. West testified that the letter containing this check had not been opened until many days after his arrest, and Katharine took the stand and swore that it was she herself who had opened the envelope. But even while she testified she saw that she was not believed; and she had to admit within herself that her father's story appeared absurdly implausible, compared to the truth-visaged falsehoods of the prosecution.

But when the evidence was all in and the time for argument was come, Katherine called up her every resource, she remembered that truth was on her side, and she presented the case clearly and logically, and ended with a strong and eloquent plea for her father. As she sat down, there was a profound hush in the court-room.

Her father squeezed her hand. Tears stood in his eyes.

"Whatever happens," he whispered, "I'm proud of my daughter."

Kennedy's address was brief and perfunctory, for the case seemed too easy to warrant his exertion. Still stimulated by the emotion aroused by her own speech and the sense of the righteousness of her cause, Katherine watched the jury go out with a fluttering hope. She still clung to hope when, after a short absence, the jury filed back in. She rose and held her breath while they took their seats.

"You have reached a verdict, gentlemen?" asked Judge Kellog.

"We have," answered the foreman.

"What is it?"

"We find the defendant guilty."

Doctor West let out a little moan, and his head fell forward into his arms. Katherine bent over him and whispered a word of comfort into his ear; then rose and made a motion for a new trial. Judge Kellog denied the motion, and haltingly asked Doctor West to step forward to the bar. Doctor West did so, and the two old men, who had been friends since childhood, looked at each other for a s.p.a.ce. Then in a husky voice Judge Kellog p.r.o.nounced sentence: One thousand dollars fine and six months in the county jail.

It was a light sentence--but enough to blacken an honest name for life, enough to break a sensitive heart like Doctor West's.

A little later Katherine, holding an arm of her father tightly within her own, walked with him and fat, good-natured Sheriff Nichols over to the old brick county jail. And yet a little later, erect, eyes straight before her, she came down the jail steps and started homeward.

As she was pa.s.sing along the Square, immediately before her Harrison Blake came out of his stairway and started across the sidewalk to his waiting car. Discretion urged her to silence; but pa.s.sion was the stronger. She stepped squarely up before him and flashed him a blazing look.

"Well--and so you think you've won!" she cried in a low voice.

His colour changed, but instantly he was master of himself.

"What, Katherine, you still persist in that absurd idea of yesterday."

"Oh, drop that pretence! We know each other too well for that!" She moved nearer and, trembling from head to foot, her pa.s.sionate defiance burst all bounds. "You think you have won, don't you!" she hotly cried. "Well, let me tell you that this affair is not merely a battle that was to-day won and ended! It's a war--and I have just begun to fight!"

And sweeping quickly past him, she walked on into Main Street and down it through the staring crowds--very erect, a red spot in either cheek, her eyes defiantly meeting every eye.

CHAPTER XII

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS AT BRUCE'S DOOR