Three panels were exhausted, before twelve good men and true could be found who knew, Pelham judged from their answers, nothing whatever about unions or strikes; who had never heard of this strike; who did not read the papers. Eight were farmers from distant edges of the county, one was a bookkeeper as anemic as prosecutor Chippen himself, two were small business men, and the last a nondescript nonagenarian who called himself a "watchman."
Once the jury was chosen, the trial went swiftly enough. The State called the policemen, and made out a prima facie case against the negro. In answer to old Hilary's glib questions, the officers confessed that the negro had claimed self-defense; that Dawson's discarded pistol had an indented shell in it. McGue's evidence as to the fake telephone call helped; but the case for the State could have been stronger.
The defense evidently intended to take no risks. First they put on several of those present at the mass meeting when Dawson had denounced the negro, sympathizers with the Voice of Labor machine. Invariably these swore to the big strike leader's unreasonable anger against the expelled member. The radical union men in the room could hardly be restrained from hissing; but the testimony went in, and, Pelham noted, Spence's attack lacked some of his usual vigor. At last Cole himself was called. He gave his evidence with that easy circumspection that told to the initiated that he had been thoroughly coached. Nor could cross-examination twist any of his statements.
In rebuttal several of the sincerer strikers were put on; but this last minute recourse did not impress the jury.
The final speeches for the defense were masterly. Colonel Pugh led off, and in vulture-like gyrations pictured the incursion of this carpet-bagger from the North who had thrown good Adamsville men out of their jobs, and damaged all the business of the district; of his senseless persecution of this negro; of Cole's loyalty to the miners' union, and the death of his brothers on the mountain; and finally, of the negro's own act, a simple defense of the life which God gave him.
"They claim that this defendant received a bribe from a man then an ex-employee of the company. Who says so? One John McGue, who admits he is now under indictment in connection with this strike. There is no corroboration; Cole denies it, Jim Hewin, a deputy sheriff, denies it. Believe a jail bird against two witnesses like that? Why, they cannot even invent a motive to account for the fictitious presence of this fictitious money!...
"Are we to have it written down forever in the annals of Adamsville that a black man comes into our courts, and does not get justice? Will you make Ed Cole swing because of the color which his Creator imposed on him? Will you gentlemen be connivers at the legal lynching of an innocent man? Will your decision be that a white scoundrel can attempt to murder a negro, and that the negro must die for a man's first duty, self-protection?"
He ended with oratorical sky-rockets, and sank, seemingly exhausted, into the considerate arms of his legal twin brethren, Garfunkel and Leach.
Spence came next. When he reached the cause of the strike, his words rang convincingly; but the jury were unsympathetic to this. As he proceeded to the case before him, he tried to tear the careful web of evidence which backed up the negro's claim; the talesmen seemed impressed.
Zebulun Hilary's concluding speech for the negro found him in his most telling mood. He had been a leading pleader at the bar sixty years before; and the momentum of that stretch of time had multiplied his powers of persuasion until even Pelham had to confess his weird mastery of the emotions of men. He riddled the case for the State; there was no evidence to contradict the defendant's candid story. He pictured the desolate Cole home, now sought to be robbed of its last bread-winner; he wrung the hearts and the consciences of each juryman with powerful emotional onslaughts. When he finished, an acquittal, unless the last speaker could change the trend, seemed inevitable.