The jury was impaneled, Mr. Caput Magnus passing through that trying ordeal with great éclat.
"You may proceed to open your case," directed the judge.
The staff saw a very white Caput Magnus rise and bow in the direction of the bench. Then he stepped to the jury box and cleared his throat. His official associates held their breath expectantly. Would he—or wouldn't he? There was a pause.
Then: "Mister Foreman and gentlemen of the jury," declaimed Caput in flutelike tones: "The defendant is indicted for the crime of bigamy, an offense alike repugnant to religion, civilization and to the law."
The words flowed from him like a rippling sunlit stream; encircled him like a necklace of verbal jewels, a rosary, each word a pearl or a bead or whatever it is. With perfect articulation, enunciation and gesticulation Mr. Caput Magnus went on to inform his hearers that Mr. Higgleby was a bigamist of the deepest dye, that he had feloniously, wilfully and knowingly married two several females, and by every standard of conduct was utterly and entirely detestable.
Mr. Higgleby, flanked by Tutt and Mr. Tutt, listened calmly. Caput warmed to his task.
The said Higgleby, said he, had as aforesaid in the indictment committed the act of bigamy, to wit, of marriage when he had one legal wife already, in New York City on the seventeenth of last December, by marrying in Grace Church Chantry the lady whom they saw sitting by the other lady—he meant the one with the red feather in her bonnet—that is to say, her hat, whereas the other lady, as he had said aforesaid, had been lawfully and properly married to the defendant the preceding May, to wit, in Chicago as aforesaid—
"Pardon me!" interrupted the foreman petulantly. "Which is the lady you mean was married to the defendant in New York? You said she was sitting by the other lady and that you meant the one with the red feather, but you didn't say whether the one with the red feather was the other lady or the one you were talking about."
Caput gagged and turned pink.
"I—I—" he stammered. "The lady in the red bonnet is—the—New York lady."