“Eh? What? Do you understand what you are saying?”
“Perfectly.”
“Perfectly? Indeed. Have you come here to give evidence for the Crown against the prisoner at the bar?”
“I have nothing to do with the prisoner. I have come to disclose the guilty parties, who, so far as I am aware, never in their lives spoke two words to the prisoner at the bar.”
“Your Honour,” said the bewildered barrister, “I have nothing further to ask the witness. I frankly own that I consider him hardly accountable for what he says—his general appearance, his manner of life, his inability to reckon time, all point to mental eccentricity, to mental eccentricity in an acute form.”
But the counsel for the defence was on his feet.
“My good sir,” he said, addressing the witness, with an urbanity of tone and manner that Benjamin in his palmiest days could not have surpassed, “putting aside all worry about dates, or the case for the Crown, or the prisoner at the bar, none of which need concern you in the slightest degree, kindly tell the jury what occurred in your cave on the day of the thunderstorm.”
“Four men entered, and from the place where I lay hid I overheard their conversation. It referred to the murder of Isaac Zahn.”
“Exactly what I should have imagined. Did you know the four men? Who were they? What were their names?”
“I knew the names they went by, and I recognised their faces as those of men I had met in Timber Town.”