“He looked like death. He seized the bottle on the table, poured out half a tumbler full of the stuff in it, drank it off, and then fell into a chair, and laid his face between his hands. He appeared ill, or alarmed, but the color came back into his cheek after a third or fourth glass. Then I saw him go to the sleeping man and bend over him, listening apparently to his breathing. Then he shook him several times, as if trying to arouse him. But the man lay like a log. Finally, about half-an-hour after what I have described, he opened the door and went out. He soon returned, took up the sleeping man in his arms—his weight seemed lighter than you would expect—and carried him out. From the roof I saw him push the door in the palisade leading into the waste land, a door which I myself had left open an hour before. It was not light enough to see what he did there; but he soon returned alone and walked away.”
Such was the sum of Winter’s evidence, which, if accepted, entirely corroborated Barton’s theory of the manner of the murder.
In cross-examination, Winter was asked the very natural question:
“How did you come to find yourself on the roof of the Hit or Miss late at night?”
Winter nearly rose from his litter, his worn faced flushed, his eye sparkling.
“Sir, I flew!”
There was a murmur and titter through the court, which was, of course, instantly suppressed.
“You flew! What do you mean by saying that you flew?”
“I am the inventor of a flying machine, which, for thirty years, I have labored at and striven to bring to perfection. On that one night, as I was experimenting with it, where I usually did, inside the waste land bordering on the Hit or Miss, the machine actually worked, and I was projected in the machine, as it were, to some height in the air, coming down with à fluttering motion, like a falling feather, on the roof of the Hit or Miss.”
Here the learned counsel for the defence smiled with infinite expression at the jury.