An aged, doddering man tottered to the chair. He scarcely spoke in answer to Eades's questions; when he did, it was in the weak, quavering voice of senility. He had no occupation, knew none of the lawyers, had no knowledge of the case, had neither formed nor expressed opinions, and had no scruples against capital punishment.
"You believe that the laws should be executed and upheld?" said Eades in an insinuating tone.
"Heh?" said the old man, leaning forward with an open palm behind his hairy ear.
Eades repeated the question and the fellow nodded.
Marriott turned in disgust from this stupid, senile man who was qualified, as impatiently as Glassford had turned from the intelligent man who was disqualified. And then, just as Walker was making for the jury-box, Marriott used his last peremptory challenge.
A moment later he saw his mistake. Gard was calling a name he knew.
"William A. Broadwell."
The short winter afternoon was closing in. For half an hour shadows had been stealing wearily through the room; the spectators had become a blurred mass, the jurymen lounging in the box had grown indistinct in the gloom. For some time, the green shade of the electric lamp on the clerk's desk had been glowing, but now, as Broadwell came forward, the old bailiff, shuffling across the floor, suddenly switched on the electricity, and group by group, cluster by cluster, the bulbs sprang into light, first in the ceiling, then on the walls, then about the judge's bench. There was a touch of the theatrical in it, for the lights seemed to have been switched on to illuminate the entrance of this important man.
He was sworn and took the witness-chair, which he completely filled, and clasped his white hands across his round paunch with an air that savored of piety and unction. The few gray hairs glistening at the sides of his round bald head gave it a tonsured appearance; fat enfolded his skull, rounding at his temples, swelling on his clean-shaven, monkish cheeks, falling in folds like dewlaps over his linen collar. He sat there with satisfaction, breathing heavily, making no movement, excepting as to his thin lips which he pursed now and then as if to adjust them more and more perfectly to what he considered the proper expression of impeccability. Marriott was utterly sick at heart. For he knew William A. Broadwell, orthodox, formal, eminently respectable, a server on committees, a deacon with certain cheap honors of the churchly kind, a Pharisee of the Pharisees.
In his low solemn voice, pursing his lips nicely after each sentence as if his own words tasted good to him, Broadwell answered Eades's questions; he had no opposition to capital punishment, indeed, he added quite gratuitously, he believed in supporting it; he had great veneration for the law, and--oh, yes, he had read accounts of the murder; read them merely because he esteemed it a citizen's duty to be conversant with affairs of the day, and he had formed opinions as any intelligent man must necessarily.